Dear all,This is William from China. I am currently working as a SAP contract consultant in IBM. I plan to change my career into management consultant. Furthermore, I plan to further my study in Univeristy of Melbourne of Master of Information System. The reason why i want to study this program is that I only have three years working experiences now and I don't think it would be smart for me to study MBA directly. Would it be helpful for me to study this MIS program if I want to change my career into management consultant? Moreover, though my english is quite outstanding compared to most of my Chinese mates. I am a little worried whether I can fit as a management consultant in another country. Do you guys have any colleagues who is not a native speaker in the management consulting firms and totally fit into the environment well?The third question is that I want to look for a SAP job as soon as I land in Australia in order to change my student visa to work permit and change my full time degree to part time degree. It this a legit and easy way to go? RegardsWilliam Bai

I cannot for the life of me see how you would think doing an IT masters will help you move to management consulting. It won't. The only thing that will help you move to MC is frankly a good MBA. Now if you actually want to move to IT consulting and not MC, that's probably doable and does not need you to go and get any further degrees.

There's this saying:Prior Planning & Preparation Prevents Pi*s Poor Performance. The 7Ps.

In my opinion, even for management consulting, it has many specialisations to choose,for example,like electronic commerce. For this degree, I can choose many electronic courses as elective.

answers:NoNoNo

I'm beginning to suspect that we're talking at cross-purposes here. You clearly don't know what management consultants do, but "in your opinion" you've got it figured out, so go for it champ!

Baykus he is interested in electronic commerce because he wants out of Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte unless it's in Australia in which case he wants more Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte while blending in like camoflage with potted plants and ferns in reception.

I haven't figured out, that's the reason I start this thread and want to ask your advices and let me know more about this career.

I do want to get out of SAP and see if I have other options in career, even in Australia. The reason I said I want to change my student visa to work permit is that I think by studying part-time and do a little more time what I know I can do, I could pay some loan of my tuition. Then probably I can change my career after i get the degree of MIS. Moreover, I think it is very reasonable to blend in a place where I want to go for study. I don't like to define people by races or nationalities.

baykus, are you a management consultant?If you are, please tell me how to become one in my circumstance and what do mangement consultants do in their daily job.

Did you even read your question after writing it!?!Why would you want to become a Management Consultant without even knowing what one is or what an MC does!?

I know the broad thing, like giving the strategic solution to customers, doing data analysis and research to support the proof. But I want to know more about the specifics from this forum like what's their daily job, what's the obstacles they may meet in the work and what's the specialisation for management consultants. Is the mba "the only thing that will help me move to MC" like baykus mentioned?Furthermore, I know this career has higher pay and involves lots of opportunities to travel around the world, to know more about how the business run. As a youngster,that's the experience I admire.

OK, Mr Bai,Late response, but whatever. Firstly, let me disclose some funny coincidence : I too was an SAP consultant for 5.5 years (mostly spent in the US), and I did an MBA in the UK. I do owe it to my MBA that I fortunately "leapfrogged" to the so-called fancy strategy role – though in industry i.e. not in a consulting company. Also, note the word ‘leapfrogged’; basic human psychology says that people use inferior sounding words to refer to one thing so as to convince themselves that something else that they want is actually automatically superior by reason ! Just mean to say that I think I have achieved the career change that I had always desired, but my new career has only just begun now ...I was virtually in the same situation as you are about MC, back when I was trying to shift careers. As you have already mentioned, indeed we IT consultants do NOT understand what an MC does – because we do not understand WHY s/he does it i.e. the business implications of his/her work ! But don’t worry, people from variety of other functions also may not necessarily understand the MC/Strategy roles. Let me also mention a word of caution : parts of SAP (or ERP, in general) consulting are referred to as MC by the likes of Accenture, IBM, Capgemini – but I think you are more interested in the Strategy side of MC. Strategy by itself is still too broad a term. And I am not even talking about recruitment strategies and portfolios (projects, customers, geographies) of MC companies yet !I am sorry that I don’t have the best words (still) to explain what could have made my life easier if only I had “understood” what a real MC does and why. MIS degree will (most likely) KILL your strategy/MC dreams, or at max land you in IT strategy. The problem is that people apply Newton’s law of mass-energy conservation to skills as well (although they don’t realise that, they are just good at being sceptics). I do NOT mean that they are wrong, nor correct. I am glad that at least you realise that your current understanding of MC is superficial, that’s a good start. Even the MBA admissions process uses Newton’s same law, so take that as a learning experience. Just getting an MBA degree will NOT help you stop people from using Newton’s law on you. What helped me make the transition was a number of hands-on projects embedded in my MBA programme. In fact, just as an example, I used a better market-sizing method than one of MBB on one of my projects. Lastly, MBA only keeps getting more and more financially draining, while you scramble for a career-change – which can easily spill over to your emotional peace with yourself and family.Something that “possibly” will help you is to try and find out “why” your client tells you to do things in SAP, why their SAP system is designed the way it is, how different clients (possibly, different from industries, countries) have configured their SAP systems and “why”. For instance, if you created a slow-moving stock report in SAP, try to find out how client has used that to review their inventory. Or, if you worked on a customer data cleansing project, try to find out how the client eventually used this (say, better segmentation or promotions etc etc). Be prepared to get laughed at / ignored altogether, when you ask people about the business implications of your SAP work. Because business decisions may take a looooong time to reach SAP, plus when they do, they’ll have been broken down into some SAP/IT terms. Assuming I worked on some profitability reports for DHL US, would that have any link to DHL’s withdrawal from US domestic market after crash of 2008 ? I don’t know.Though thinking in that vein, I should have been either a business process consultant or something on the procurement/inbound supply chain side after MBA. My current role and my SAP days are two different universes.Also try to find out what the so-called MC companies do; possibly their publications, reports, even presentation-slides. If/when you obtain these things and check the contents, do NOT focus on “what”, try to focus on “why” they are saying so and “how” they may have collected the information and concluded what they have.Good luck.

Go for the MIS as planned and get into IT Strategy consulting with the likes of Accenture,Deloitte, IBM, etc., Thats the closest you can get to MC at this stage with your plans. Even for IT Strategy these firms fill with MBAs.