From Intern to Full-Time Consultant: Deepen Your Skills (2)

As you transition from intern to full-time consultant, the depth and breadth of your analytical skills become increasingly important. While interns often focus on data gathering and initial analysis, full-time consultants are expected to conduct more complex analyses, derive deeper insights, and translate these into actionable recommendations.

Develop Your Consulting Toolkit

As an intern, you likely had a basic understanding of common consulting skillset. Your toolkit was probably limited to what you learned in training sessions or picked up during your internship projects. As you transition to a full-time consultant, it's crucial to significantly expand and refine your consulting toolkit to handle more complex projects and responsibilities.

💡 Pro Tip: While the list below focuses on transition from intern to full-time, you should also have a look at a broader piece of work around essential hard skills in consulting.

• Advanced Presentation and Storytelling: Move beyond creating visually appealing slides to mastering the art of business storytelling. Learn how to structure compelling narratives that drive action, tailor your communication style to different stakeholders, and effectively handle challenging questions during high-stakes presentations.
• Facilitation Skills: Full-time consultants often lead workshops and strategic planning sessions. Develop skills in facilitating group discussions, managing diverse opinions, and driving groups towards consensus. Learn techniques for creative problem-solving in group settings.
• Build Your Own Resource Library: Start curating your own collection of best practices, templates, and tools. This might include building a personal database of effective slides, useful examples of data analysis, or summaries of key insights from past projects. Having this resource at your fingertips can significantly boost your efficiency and effectiveness.

Remember, developing your consulting toolkit is an ongoing process. Stay curious, always be on the lookout for new tools and approaches, and don't hesitate to experiment. Your unique combination of tools and skills will become a key differentiator as you progress in your consulting career.

Master Advanced Excel and PowerPoint

As an intern, you likely had basic proficiency in Excel and PowerPoint, using them for simple data analysis and creating straightforward slides. Your work in these tools was probably closely supervised and often refined by more senior team members before being finalized.

As a full-time consultant, your proficiency in Excel and PowerPoint needs to be significantly higher. You will have less supervision, and more independence as we have already seen in earlier sections of this article. Combining this with the higher expectations from you - requires you to be on the leading edge in leveraging these tools to the best extent offered by the tools. Your ability to leverage these tools effectively can dramatically impact your efficiency, the depth of your analysis, and the impact of your presentations.

Excel Mastery

The small list below highlights some of the key aspects of Excel where skill development will pay big dividends for interns moving into a full-time role.

💡 For a more comprehensive outlook on Excel skills required for consultants, have a look at this article: Excel for Consultants

• Advanced Financial Modeling: Move beyond basic calculations and learn to build bigger and better models. Learn some financial tricks as well to create financial models that support analysis like DCF. Most importantly, focus on learning how to develop models that are robust, scalable, and flexible with minimal efforts - because changes will keep on happening till the last moment.
• Data Analysis and Manipulation: Learn advanced techniques in data analysis, including advanced formulas, array functions, nested logics, pivot tables, and a lot more.
• Automation with VBA: Develop a basic understanding of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to be able to automate repetitive tasks, create custom functions, and build more sophisticated analytical tools. Even if you're not writing complex macros, understanding VBA can help you modify and troubleshoot existing ones you may encounter. Simple actions like creating an automatic table-of-contents sheet in excel can require using VBA - and if done right, can save you an hour of effort on having to manually list and link the 30 different sheets in your model.

PowerPoint Mastery

PowerPoint is the most essential of tools in the consultant’s arsenal. Moving into a full-time role - you must master absolutely everything there is to the software. Every single piece of knowledge you add to your skillset - will help you become 1% better and more efficient at doing your job. And all those 1%s will soon add-up and make you a stellar consultant.

💡 Now while some of the points below are the key focus areas for moving into a full-time role, you must be fully prepared on all aspects as can be found in this article: PowerPoint for Consultants

• Efficiency and Consistency: Become adept at using slide masters, custom layouts, and style guides. This ensures consistency across your decks and dramatically improves your efficiency in creating and updating presentations. Learn to set up templates that align with your firm's branding guidelines. This will help you get the basic hygiene checks out of the way with minimal effort.
• Integration with Excel: Master the art of linking Excel data to PowerPoint charts and tables - especially with tools like ThinkCell. This allows for quick updates and ensures your presentations are always based on the latest data.
• Shortcuts: This is an essential skill for becoming faster and agile in PowerPoint. Knowing the right shortcuts will help you get out of tight situations and free up your mind capacity for actual slide work and story lining.

Conclusion

The transition from intern to full-time consultant requires a deepening of analytical skills and extensive development in the use of Excel and PowerPoint. Mastery of advanced presentation and facilitation techniques, along with the continuous expansion of your consulting toolkit, is essential for success in your new role.

Explore the other articles in our content series "From Intern to Full-Time Consultant.":

👉 Article 1: Changed Expectations and Responsibilities
Understand how the expectations of you will change and what new responsibilities you will take on.

👉 Article 3: Strengthen Your Business Acumen
Discover how to develop a deeper, practical understanding of industries and business models.

👉 [Coming soon] Article 4: Enhance Your Communication Skills
Develop your abilities to communicate effectively with clients, team members, and leaders.

👉 [Coming soon] Article 5: Develop Your Executive Presence
Learn how to present yourself as a competent leader.

👉 [Coming soon] Article 6: Cultivate Client Relationships
Understand how to build and maintain strong, trusting relationships with clients.

👉 [Coming soon] Article 7: Manage Work-Life Balance
Get tips and strategies for finding a healthy balance between work and personal life.

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