How useful would experience within the operations division of an investment bank be as a stepping-stone to strategy consulting? Bearing in mind I enquire for about experience procured at a very junior level, say either as a graduate or an intern, would it be any more valuable to be working within a front office division?

Hi,Do you know that McDonalds are recruiting? You'd learn more there.

Nice, anything useful to say?

Strategy consultancies - including big names such as McKinsey - also have operations practices. You could try to target them.However I think they recruit experienced people, especially now.Also I don't know what are your chances to move to the real strategy projects, once you've joined the ops practice.

Thanks Olivier, while I realize that applying directly to the Consultancy industry is an option, at the junior levels it seems to be very difficult to obtain any experience. Most firms I have spoken with generally prefer to hire advanced degree holders onto their internship and, in some cases, even graduate programmes.I suppose the question I should have asked is IB Ops or IB Corp. Finance/M&A as an Intern or Grad. would it make a difference?

"How useful would experience within the operations division of an investment bank be as a stepping-stone to strategy consulting?"Probably about as useful as a chocolate teapot. Operations within IB is a lot of manual work i.e. checking things are in order, and as far as I'm aware not related to the Operational type work carried out in consulting.

From what I know there are two sides, while trade processing/execution is one side, it tends also to be the "change" division of the bank which is about streamlining and process management.Chocolate teapot lined with ceramic perhaps?

Change in the sense of the "internal consultancy" functions tend to fall in a different part of the bank (HO/corporate functions). However, some banks include IT operations within "operations", which can include "IT change" roles - which is more about maintaining the change controls for ongoing systems.