Speaker: Amarjit Sahota, Principal Consultant at NECS Consultancy and University of Birmingham alum (Executive MBA and Level 7 Senior Leader Apprenticeship)
[Music] The skills and attributes that are important in the management consultant sector, and where I work, are heavily linked to the new attributes that have been developed by the University of Birmingham.
The first one that comes to mind is actually being a, uh, critical thinker. It's important to be a critical thinker in the management consultancy world because, obviously, clients approach you with a project or a problem that they have. So, they employ you to actually think about the problem, analyze what's causing it, come up with a solution, and then implement it.
Finally, it's all about communication and collaborative working. Having a niche market within the health and social care sector, it's important that you're able to communicate and collaborate with people across all different backgrounds and audiences. When you think of how diverse we are as a population, we need to make sure that there are no barriers—so that we can actually understand what people's problems are, what they're trying to say, and then be able to articulate it in the services and solutions that we're delivering.
It's very important for students to get involved in activities that support these attributes because it's a platform that's already been established for them to achieve them. The University has some great examples of this already. They've got the Birmingham Award, which helps develop attributes through mechanisms such as coaching and mentoring.
The disadvantage of not having these attributes is that it demonstrates a lack of real-life experience, and employers nowadays are looking for real-life experience—so people can actually interpret what they've done outside and how they're applying that in the working world.
Also, I think the NHS is really open with who it employs as well. It wants people who are caring, who are natural collaborators, and who are ultimately seeking the best outcome—thinking of new solutions in terms of how we can actually improve public health.
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