A career in the consultancy sector guarantees varied, challenging activities and the chance to work with highly motivated, high calibre people. In the engineering sector, consultancies can range in size from just one or two people to many thousands. Mike Greer, 27 from Hull, works for one of the best known consultancies in the world: McKinsey & Company.

While McKinsey is renowned as a general management consultancy, its Operations Practice, representing manufacturing, product development, supply chain management, purchasing and service operations expertise, is one of its largest. Greer is part of the Production Systems Design Centre (PSDC), a group within the Operations Practice that specialises in helping companies transform their manufacturing and service operations through the elimination of waste and improvements in productivity in everyday operations.

The core of the PSDC's activity takes place with engineering and manufacturing firms, where it applies the lean manufacturing techniques, made famous by Toyota, through McKinsey's performance transformation approach. But PSDC teams also work in sectors as diverse as healthcare and financial services, where they make use of the same basic techniques to help organisations maximise their effectiveness.

A consultancy role was not Mike Greer's initial career ambition; he started his academic life by studying mathematics at Cambridge University, but three years in the abstract world of numbers left him craving a path with stronger links to the real world. "Even the applied side of maths at Cambridge meant calculating the age of stars or the mass of Jupiter," he recalls. "I wanted something that had more to do with people."

Practical experience

A postgraduate diploma in Manufacturing Management, also at Cambridge, was the answer, and the next 12 months were to provide the basis for Greer's later career. "The essence of the Manufacturing Management course was to give you as much experience of real industry as possible," he recalls. "I spent time in a steel company, a firm that makes fire detection equipment and a general metal fabrication firm. I very quickly gained an insight into the way people and machines must interact with each other in order for these companies to work successfully. It could also be very exciting, particularly in the steel plant where you were working in close proximity to train-loads of molten metal."

After completing his diploma, Greer spent some time as a manufacturing engineer in the high tech sector, before enrolling on a Teaching Company Scheme (TCS) run by Warwick Manufacturing Group, part of Warwick University. TCS projects are designed to give companies access to the expertise and resources of universities in a convenient and effective way. TCS participants spend two years working at a participating company, undertaking one or more major projects with mentoring and support from the sponsoring academic institution.

Greer's TCS project involved the implementation of a new software system for the management of spare parts at an airline company. Working with a full time member of the airline's engineering staff, Greer installed the system, managed the test process and implemented a cascaded training programme that made use of 'super users' to train 150 of the airline's staff worldwide.

"The TCS system was fantastic for companies like this, that would not otherwise have access to the kind of resources and personnel made available to them through the projects," he says. "I was one of four TCS participants to undertake projects at the airline, and the other three all ended up taking on full time jobs either there or in closely-related supplier firms."

For Greer, the end of the TCS programme left him unsure of his next step. "I thought I was in a difficult position," he recalls, "I had a bit of experience, but I was by no means an expert in any one area. At the same time, I wasn't a fresh graduate anymore. Quite a few of my university colleagues had taken roles in consultancies, but I thought that the big consultancies wouldn't be interested in somebody with my background."

Structured environment

Fortunately, Greer was in fact exactly the right sort of person for the PSDC. This McKinsey office was established in the late 1990s in response to difficulties in recruiting engineers who met McKinsey's high academic requirements, had experience in leading and implementing successful lean transformations and had the passion to drive and influence change in other companies in a consultant role. McKinsey's response was to set up its own academy in which it could grow its own future specialist consultants in a structured environment while they worked on real projects with clients.

The UK PSDC, in Stratford-upon-Avon, was the first training academy to be established. Further facilities have since been created in California, Lyon, Hanover and Shanghai. Since 1998, more than 40 high calibre engineers - most of them, like Greer, with strong academic backgrounds and a few years' practical experience - have completed the 25-month training programme and gone on to become consultants based at McKinsey offices around the world.

Now, four months away from the completion of his PSDC programme, Greer has found the McKinsey experience both demanding and fulfilling. "There is a culture here of stretching yourself and producing nothing less than outstanding quality work," he says. "But at the same time, there is a lot of mentoring and support. The company has very high expectations of you, but all the training is aimed at making you more effective."

Some engineers may find the prospect of yet more training less than appealing after several years in university education and the first few years of a career in industry. Mike rejects this: "The PSDC is not a typical training scheme. It is first and foremost a proper job, but one that provides practical skills through on-the-job development. I do not see it as that different to the early training given at most blue chip companies."

Communication skills

Comparing his current role with his academic past, Greer sees an important change in emphasis. "At university, everything was about using rigorous methods to get to the right answer. Here there is much more emphasis on the skills you need to communicate ideas and persuade people to adopt them. Those skills are vital in our work, but they would be meaningless if we didn't all have that rigorous academic background."

Looking back on his time so far, Greer is extremely positive about the McKinsey experience. "The work has been extremely varied, and while the long hours have sometimes been difficult, there has been a lot of excitement and opportunities to work in fascinating firms in different parts of the world." Of course, a consultancy role is not for everybody: Greer agrees that many of his colleagues share some fundamental characteristics. "Almost everyone here is extremely bright, with a structured way of going about things, and excellent communication skills. They are a fantastic group of people to work with."