How to get promoted from analyst to consultant: the 9 skills you need

Analyst to consultant is the promotion almost everyone gets. That's exactly why people get it wrong: they assume tenure will do it, coast for two years, and then find the panel can't tick the boxes because there's no evidence on paper. To convince people you're ready, the simplest thing is to show them. If you already have the skills of the grade above, you're sorted.

Here are the skills you're expected to have, the way I'd explain them to an analyst on my team. As you read, note where you have gaps, then go looking for work that fills them.

Act a level up for six months

You'll typically have around two years at analyst to build these. My biggest tip, especially for the over-achievers: show consultant-level skills for at least six months before you go for it. The easiest way is to get a consultant role on a project while you're still an analyst. Do it for a year and it can even get you promoted early, and it won't look like a fluke.

The nine skills you're assessed on

At this grade the firm wants to see two things: that you've built the core consulting skills, and that you've spent most of your time on client work.

1. Own a small piece of a big project. Nobody expects you to lead a team of five. They do expect you to manage your own work against the wider plan and take something end to end. I used to own the final deliverable, or collate a proposal. They're testing whether you can find the right people, work with them and juggle deadlines.
2. Hold the room with a client on your own. If I leave you alone with the client, can you run the conversation, get the outcome the meeting needed, and come out without promising far more than we can deliver? We call that scope creep.
3. Leadership presence, even when you don't feel confident, which, let's be real, is most of the time. You make your team and the client feel confident. You don't have to be an extrovert: one of my friends is an introvert and creates it just by being calm and making people feel safe. Communicating clearly and professionally is part of this.
4. Attention to detail. Your managers and directors need to trust your work enough not to review it before it goes to the client. They will anyway, but your aim is zero mistakes. And have your head in the weeds: know the client's revenue, know the numbers in the model you built, so your manager can turn to you in a meeting for the detail.
5. Problem solving, by yourself. Take a chunky piece of the client's problem, use the data you've gathered and come up with the best recommendation on your own. I struggled with this the first few times. What I realised is there's no single right way to think. I learnt most of my ways of breaking down problems by watching how my managers did it and copying them.
6. Giving back to the firm. I was on the analyst committee, helped build a lab I took clients through, and kept our retail industry trends up to date. That's three distinct contributions: to people, to clients and to the firm's knowledge. Pick things you enjoy or learn from.
7. Business, industry and technology knowledge. Even in strategy or operations you'll be assessed on all three, because technology drives almost every business problem now. Read up on the trends, understand how your client's business actually makes money, and then apply it to their situation. I used to drop it subtly into answers so I looked like I knew my stuff.
8. Basic financial acumen. If you hated maths at school, sorry. You need to read an annual report or a P&L, understand it, and use it to support a recommendation. Even in tech consulting they'll want to see it, so set up the project financials or track the team's budget.
9. Logical thinking. From all the data you see, how do you organise it and tell the story? It shows up most in your slides and your recommendations. How pretty the deck is matters far less than the story it tells, and you'll be assessed on this all the way to partner. (It's the same skill as building a strawman.)

On top of these, there'll be specialist skills for your area. In UX design, show your design has improved; in AI, show your AI knowledge has.

If the panel can't see it, it didn't happen

You'll read that list and think you do all of it. I did too. It doesn't matter if the person on your promotion panel can't see the evidence.

Take financial acumen. You'll almost certainly pick it up on any project, but nobody assessing you can tick that box unless they can see it. That's when you deliberately take on something visible, like running the financials for your project. Notice too that most of these are soft skills, not hard ones.

Utilisation: be on client work

Most firms also want a certain share of your time on client projects. We call it utilisation. When you're junior you're expected to be on client work most of the time, because that's where you learn fastest. You'll get clients you can't stand, and you'll learn the most from them.

What your promotion case looks like at this grade

Mine was simple: three slides.

1. Summary. A bit about me and what I wanted to build at work, a timeline of my year split into client work and business development (with far more in the client row), my three biggest achievements, and what I wanted to develop next.
2. The skills. Each skill for the grade above, mapped to the projects where I showed it.
3. Feedback. Quotes from people who managed me and people I managed, as proof that others thought I was ready.

Before any of that, I write down everything I work on, even a one-hour task, in a table I update every time I finish something. In my first year nobody told me to, and when reviews came round I couldn't remember half of what I'd done. I have the memory of a goldfish.

Where to start

Find your firm's criteria for consultant. Most firms publish a list per grade. Put it next to the nine skills above, mark the gaps, and go looking for the projects that fill them. That also gives you a legitimate reason to say no to work that only gives you skills you already have.

You're not hand-held here. Be proactive, and measure the gain, not the gap. When you're ready for the next step, read how to get promoted from consultant to manager: it's a completely different test. For the tactics that apply at every grade, see how to get promoted.