P&Q’s 2026 Best in Class: INSEAD, Consulting

PRACTICAL COMPLEMENTED BY THEORETICAL

In many ways, the Master Strategist Day also reflects the INSEAD approach to consulting by emphasizing the practical over the theoretical. It was a lesson hammered home in the school’s core Introduction to Strategic Management course. Here, students learn how to break strategy down into bite-sized pieces, so it could be implemented. With the advent of AI, says Shu, this approach is all the more foundational to consulting clients.

“Clients don’t want to hire just generalists: they are looking for graduates who have operational or execution experience,” Shu concludes. “They realize that without implementation, pure strategy is not going to work anymore.”

How else does INSEAD set the bar for consulting programming. Last month, P&Q reached out to Rhoda Yap, executive director of the career development centre at INSEAD. From courses to take to skills to develop, here are Yap’s insights on how INSEAD prepares MBAs for careers in consulting.

 AN INTERVIEW WITH RHODA YAP

P&Q: INSEAD is jokingly referred to as the “Consulting school of the world,” with 50% of the 2025 MBA class entering the field. What are the two biggest reasons why consulting firms are drawn to INSEAD grads?

Yap: “I would highlight two things.

First is the diversity of the talent pool. For a global consulting firm, INSEAD is almost a one-stop shop: one class brings together people from dozens of nationalities, industries, and professional backgrounds who can potentially serve clients across markets. But diversity matters not simply because of passports. It means students become accustomed to solving problems with people who think differently, communicate differently and challenge their assumptions.

Second is learning agility. Consulting firms need people who can enter an unfamiliar situation, understand it quickly, work out what matters, and begin contributing. The intensity of a one-year MBA develops precisely that muscle. Students are constantly moving between new subjects, teams, contexts, and problems.

In many ways, INSEAD replicates something fundamental about consulting: you rarely get to choose the problem, the client, the country, or even the people on your team. You have to learn how to be effective anyway.”

P&Q: INSEAD is a one-year program, which can hinder students from completing summer internships. What are some advantages of a one-year program in preparing MBAs for a consulting career?

Yap: “I would challenge the premise slightly. An internship can certainly be valuable, but it is one route into consulting rather than the definition of readiness for consulting. INSEAD’s January intake also includes a two-month summer break, allowing students to pursue an internship or other experience.

The advantage of the one-year model is compression. Students have relatively little time to sit on the sidelines. They have to learn quickly, make choices with incomplete information, prioritise, and execute. These are all familiar conditions in consulting.

There is also the question of opportunity cost. Our students typically already have several years of professional experience. For them, time away from the workforce matters. A one-year programme allows them to make an intensive investment in themselves and return to the market quickly.

And the evidence is ultimately in employer behaviour. Consulting firms continue to recruit heavily from INSEAD for full-time roles. So I would not frame the question as internship versus no internship. The more important question is whether someone can demonstrate the judgement, problem-solving ability and interpersonal effectiveness required to perform as a consultant.”

P&Q: What are a couple of courses that INSEAD offers that help students hone consulting skills and gain consulting experience? Give a couple of examples of how these courses improve student prospects in the field?

Yap: “One example is Master Strategist Day. Students have to take a real organisational problem, diagnose it, develop strategic options, and defend their recommendations under significant time pressure. They work in teams and receive input from experienced strategy practitioners, including Bain mentors in recent editions. That is much closer to the actual work of consulting than simply learning a framework.

Another is the MBA Capstone, where students have to integrate what they have learnt across strategy, finance, operations, marketing, and other disciplines to deal with a complex business situation. That integration matters.

I think it becomes even more important in the age of AI. AI can generate analyses and possible answers extraordinarily quickly. The human advantage increasingly lies in knowing whether we are asking the right question, recognising what the analysis has missed, understanding context, and exercising judgement.

That is one of the strengths of a general-management MBA. Consulting problems rarely arrive neatly labelled “finance”, “strategy”, or “organisational behaviour”. The consultant has to see across those boundaries.

There is another lesson embedded in both experiences: collaboration. You do not always get to choose your project team in business school, just as you do not choose every colleague or client in consulting. Learning to produce excellent work with different people, under pressure, is itself part of the education.”

P&Q: When students attend INSEAD, what are the two most-important skills that MBAs gain that enable them to succeed in consulting? How do they develop these skills at INSEAD?

Yap: “The first is structured problem-solving at pace. The pace matters. It is relatively easy to produce a thoughtful answer with unlimited time and information. Consulting requires people to work out what matters when both are constrained. The accelerated programme gives students repeated practice in prioritising, making sense of ambiguity, and moving from analysis to action.

The second is earning trust.

We increasingly talk to students about becoming “referral-worthy”: becoming someone another person would be comfortable putting their own reputation behind. That goes beyond networking. It is about being prepared, curious, reliable, generous with others, and able to add value.

Students develop that through the career curriculum, coaching and interview preparation, but perhaps even more through hundreds of everyday interactions with classmates, alumni, recruiters, faculty, and project teams.

Consulting is ultimately a people business. Analytical ability may get you through a case interview. The ability to make people want to work with you, and trust you with difficult problems, is what sustains a consulting career.”

P&Q: What would you advise future INSEAD students do to better prepare for a career in consulting? As INSEAD students, what would you encourage them to do to increase their chances of landing a position in consulting?

Yap: “My first advice would be: stay curious and do not over-optimise too early.

Students understandably arrive with goals. Goals are useful; tunnel vision is not. Careers rarely unfold exactly as we predict because none of us has perfect information about the market, organisations, or even the person we will become. Curiosity keeps you learning and creates optionality. And consulting firms, fundamentally, hire people who are interested in understanding things they do not yet understand.

Second, understand what case preparation is actually for. Casing is not about memorising enough frameworks to perform the form of consulting. The substance is learning to take a gnarly, ambiguous problem, disaggregate it into solvable components, develop hypotheses, test them against evidence, and communicate a recommendation clearly.

So practise cases, absolutely, but practise the underlying way of thinking everywhere.

You should eventually be able to look at almost any messy problem and instinctively ask: What exactly are we trying to solve? What would have to be true? How could I break this down? What information would change my mind?

If you can do that when confronted with an unfamiliar business problem, or perhaps even a sufficiently complicated discussion around the family dinner table, you are probably getting somewhere.

Finally, help other people prepare. Some students understandably see recruiting as zero-sum: if someone else becomes better, perhaps my chances become worse. I think that is the wrong mental model. Explaining a case to somebody else, giving useful feedback, and seeing a problem from the interviewer’s side often makes you better yourself.

And importantly, it demonstrates a quality that consulting firms value enormously: the ability to elevate the people around you.”

DON’T MISS: 2025 MBA BEST IN CLASS AWARD FOR CONSULTING: NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY (KELLOGG)

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