A 'Reimagine Moment' for Consulting: Redesigning the Junior Role to Harness Gen Z's AI Skills

A New Junior-Level Consultant Job Description

AI is indeed leading consulting firms to rethink their job descriptions and career paths for junior-level consultants. That's because much of what firms tasked them to do even two or three years ago – chase down and analyze data, tackle basic research, create slide decks, etc.—can be handled by AI agents or queries and conversations with an AI chatbot.

Yet that hasn't dampened the consulting industry's appetite for hiring junior-level consultants. For example, McKinsey North America reportedly plans to increase its non-partner staff by 15 to 20% over the next five years, and by 12% in 2026 alone. As Eric Kutcher, senior partner and chair of McKinsey North America, recently observed on LinkedIn, "This is an AI reimagine moment," not just for consulting firm leadership and their approach to hiring members of Gen Z but for C-level execs across the business landscape and how they strategically guide their companies in the era of AI.

How, then, should consulting firms rewrite job descriptions and redesign career paths for Gen Z (and soon, Generation Alpha, whose older members have just entered their teens) talent in order to attract and retain the kinds of candidates they covet? And how to take advantage of the advanced AI skills of younger consultants once they become part of the organization?

Flattening the Pyramid

While AI may be performing much of the work once reserved for junior consultants, there's still plenty of other high-value work with which to entrust them. As it turns out, much of that work involves leveraging the AI know-how that many Gen Zers bring to the workplace as digital natives.

As heavily as AI relies on data to perform tasks and create useful output, the junior consultant job description should prioritize data literacy and validation, along with sophisticated analytics know-how. Besides the basic skill of AI prompting, orchestrating and overseeing the AI tools at hand could be a big part of that job description, too, along with other second-order skills:

• Helping develop and enforce AI governance internally and with clients
• Supporting partners with research, analytical thinking and problem-solving using AI
• Creating and overseeing AI agents
• Monitoring and auditing the output of AI capabilities internally and for clients
• Generally identifying business problems that can be solved with the help of AI, and
• Developing new ways to use AI to collect, analyze and monetize a firm's institutional knowledge.

For this new junior job description to be viable, firms also need to rethink the traditional pyramid-shaped organizational hierarchy, whereby a large contingent of junior staff work behind the scenes, building presentation decks, conducting research, and executing other tasks on behalf of partners. Instead, junior consultants might play more prominent roles on project teams and with clients, bringing their AI expertise to bear in those contexts to help select which AI models and agents to use in certain circumstances, for example, along with which questions to ask (complex prompt development), and which answers to trust. They might be better at explaining to clients the why or the what behind certain AI functionalities, for example.

Bidirectional mentorship also could be part of the junior consultant's job description, where young AI-savvy consultants who lack client and industry expertise work with more seasoned consultants who lack AI know-how, sharing their expertise with one another. That's exactly the type of relationship I, a member of Generation X, have recently been benefiting from in my work with a Gen Z intern. He's taught me a ton about AI prompting while I have imparted to him the institutional knowledge and workplace wisdom that only come with experience. Ultimately, we and our entire team benefit.

Junior consultants also need strong communication and storytelling skills to underpin their hard data and AI skills. They must be able to clearly explain the justification behind using specific AI tools, how they work, and what their output means in a specific context. They need to be able to explain to a client how AI can help reinvent a certain process, for example.

Though AI may be the focus of much of their work, it's vitally important that firms not lose sight of the big picture, and that is to ensure they give their junior consultants plenty of opportunity to accumulate the foundational knowledge, subject-matter expertise, judgment, client-management skills and overall seasoning they need to advance their careers and add value for clients and the organization. As my intern keeps reminding me, giving them consistent, actionable feedback is also critical in that regard. Because even here in the age of AI, there's no substitute for genuine person-to-person communication.

The "AI reimagine moment" has indeed arrived for consulting firms. By redesigning junior consulting job descriptions and career paths, they'll put themselves in a strong position to turn the AI expertise within Gen Z and Gen Alpha into a competitive advantage.

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Dante Ricci is the global industry marketing lead for the professional services, consumer products and public services industries at SAP. An industry expert with decades of experience in the technology sector, he has held leadership roles in product management, value engineering, operations, and marketing. Connect with him on LinkedIn.