Though firms screen for candidates who have these capabilities, they also expect to teach individuals a thing or two. Certainly, training is a huge part of consulting and a major draw for candidates looking to sharpen their business savvy. This year, our survey revealed, once again, that strategy firms offer the most training. At McKinsey, BCG, and Bain, the average consultant receives 81, 79, and 66 hours of training per year, respectively. This year, however, consultants at Avanade, an IT consulting firm, let us know that they receive nearly 10 more hours of training, as it turns out, than their peers at McKinsey, and Tata Consultancy Services is almost on a par with BCG.
   
    At least part of the reason that the top strategy firms are ahead of other firms when it comes to hours of training is that these firms instruct consultants through formal in-house workshops more than the average firm. At Bain, McKinsey, and BCG, training is delivered via in-house workshops 73 percent, 65 percent, and 52 percent of the time, respectively. Meanwhile, the industry norm is that formal in-house workshops make up only 43 percent of total training. (It’s also worth mentioning that at many firms, there is an emphasis on training “on the job,” so it is more difficult to determine the total number of hours of training delivered in such companies, and it may be misleading to compare firms on this basis alone.)
   
   

Playing the Field

Where firms are really struggling is not in finding out how and when they train consultants, but rather in finding who and how many consultants they train. Alan McIntyre, a managing director and head of the North American Banking practice at MOW, elaborates: “Because of the way the talent develops, if you don’t recruit the right number of people one year, you suffer for it year after year after year.”

It is no secret that consulting firms have long been subject to a supply constraint. Certainly, books like The War for Talent were published several years ago, after many firms had been witnessing the surfacing dilemma. But the war has continued to a crescendo, and firms now face a new set of challenges.

As the economy continues to pull itself together, hedge funds, investment banks, and — let’s not forget — Google are all actively luring away graduates who might have otherwise delved into consulting.

“All of a sudden venture capital, hedge funds, and media companies are hiring up a storm! ... Now I’m not as worried about just the other consulting firms,” says Holley.

Chris Rohn, a director at Huron, explains that as a result, “You can’t have the 20 percent turnover rate that consulting firms used to have.”

Competition is only getting stiffer. And consulting firms are playing hardball.

Alex Wittenberg, a managing director and head of the North American Enterprise Risk practice at MOW, believes, “Recruiting is starting to look more like college sports, where the college coaches used to go to seniors in high school, but now they’re looking at students who are in their first year of high school and look like they might make their high school team.”