Movemeon employer spotlights are a series of articles highlighting our clients. They detail the internal company culture, employee experience and outline their ideal candidate.
Here, we speak to Angharad, the Co-Founder of East Learning.
Lara, East Learning’s Growth Manager “Angharad and Matt are both dedicated to making a difference in the education sector. Having both left consulting, they are now building an incredible team to help them in their mission to narrow the inequalities in the education system which can have a lasting impact on children from disadvantaged backgrounds”
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In your own words, please describe what the East Learning does.
East helps schools provide better, more personalised development opportunities and support for their students. We do this by helping schools collect and use data to understand where to focus their (typically limited) resources, based on student interests and needs, and then measure the effectiveness of their efforts. This is done through a combination of software and what is essentially consultancy/change management support – upskilling school leaders in how to interpret data and use it to inform and review strategic plans, training teachers, running practice sharing workshops – whatever is most effective for a particular school.
Most of the schools we work with are in highly disadvantaged areas, with large numbers of students who don’t get much in the way of support and encouragement at home. The number of 16-year-olds who have reported that they aren’t good at anything, or don’t have any plans for their future, is heartbreaking – and something we want to help schools eliminate.
Where has the East Learning been and where do you see it going?
East Learning was ‘born’ in 2017, although the concept has been percolating in Matt’s mind for about a decade. We’ve gone from 300 students in that first year to 3,000 in 2018-9, to at least 30,000 this academic year – so we’re on a pretty solid trajectory! Our aim is to have our programme Aspirations in every school in the country – so for now, our focus is on proving impact, ensuring scalability, and making sure what we’re doing is as effective as it can be.
We’ve also just started to work with our first Local Authority to help them work with their schools to ensure that all young peoples’ needs are being met. While there is a lot of individual schools can do, a network of regional support can be significantly more effective.
What is your current role at East Learning and what was your path to getting there?
I’m a co-founder, responsible for the product and operations side of the business – which essentially means everything that isn’t actually working in the schools or building our pipeline.
I started my career at Oliver Wyman, where I spent 6 years between the London and Dubai offices before eventually getting fed up of suitcase living and going back to university to do an MSc in Computer Science. After this I joined another social enterprise, SuperCarers, where I took on a variety of roles corresponding to whatever the company needed most at the time – initially COO and Head of Product, then Director of Product and Marketing, then finally taking on sales and partnerships to cover the whole of the Customer side of the business – although always with a focus on product development, which is what I am most passionate about.
What motivated you to join East Learning?
Just over a year ago I went for coffee with Matt – a friend of a friend – to get his advice on making a move into the education sector. At that point, Matt was wrapping up his first year trialling his idea for data-driven development programmes with promising early results. Over the course of two hours, we realised that our strengths and areas of interests perfectly complemented each other, and started to get really excited about what we could achieve together. I quit my job the next day!
What is the East Learning culture like?
At the moment we’re still very small (two founders plus six part-time contractors), so the culture is defined largely by our individual personalities!
We get on incredibly well and spend a lot of our time laughing, which is a helpful antidote to the inevitable stress of starting a company. We have extremely ambitious goals, but we also know that we work best when we’re rested, healthy and happy – which means spending time with family/friends and pursuing our hobbies will always be a priority. Another focus for us is self-development, both personally and professionally – unsurprisingly, given what we do!
Beyond that, we have lots of ideas about how we want our company culture to develop but will also want this to be shaped by the rest of our team. The only thing we’re really set on is continuing our tradition of East Week, where our time is split between surfing, working and generally enjoying being by the sea!
What kind of person would suit working at East Learning?
Someone who really cares about making equality of opportunity a reality. You’ll also need to be self-motivated and comfortable working in a state of flux, given we’re dealing with both rapid growth and an extremely dynamic client base!
Movemeon employer spotlights are a series of articles highlighting our clients. They detail the internal company culture, employee experience and outline their ideal candidate.
Here, we speak to Victoria, the Business Development Principal for ViaVan.
In your own words please describe what ViaVandoes.
At ViaVan we revolutionize the way people move around cities. Our technology provides a solution for the “smarter bus”: in real-time it matches passengers who are travelling in a similar direction in one vehicle. We thus help our partners, like public transport operators and cities, transform their mobility offerings and stay competitive in the 21st century.
What is your role at ViaVan?
As a Business Development Principal, I am responsible for driving ViaVan’s partnerships with European public transport operators and cities.
How would you describe your experience there?
I particularly enjoy my role because every day is different and confronts me with a new challenge. This could be from cold-outreach, speaking at conferences in Copenhagen, leading partner workshops in Norway, or negotiating contracts for Malta.
While working with various teams across the ViaVan family-like product, finance, or legal, I can definitely say: my days never get boring!
Why did you join ViaVan?
Having been a management consultant before joining ViaVan, I knew that I wanted to continue having a client-facing role, still enjoy some business trips, but also have a much better work-life balance. Additionally, during my days in consulting, I developed a strong passion not only for transportation but specifically for innovative mobility models. Spending 100% of my time on mobility topics at ViaVan and working together with our (potential) partners was the best fit I could have found.
What’s your favourite thing about ViaVan?
My favourite thing about working for ViaVan is that I get the chance to solve one of the biggest challenges cities face today: congestion and pollution while working alongside some of the smartest but also the nicest people I have ever worked with.
How would you describe the culture and values?
At ViaVan, we care a lot about equality, responsibility, sustainability, collaborativeness & humbleness. It’s part of our mission that we believe things are better when shared, but we also want all of our teammates to take on their own initiatives and have real ownership of their responsibilities.
What kind of person would suit working at ViaVan, and what kind of person might the environment not suit?
The ideal person succeeding at ViaVan would be someone who has excelled at most things they’ve tried before, is naturally curious, down for anything (yes, this could sometimes mean doing work that is not included in the job description), willing to roll up his or her sleeves, passionate for mobility, and a true international and inter-office team player.
Someone who expects similar every-day routines prefers working on tasks alone, or isn’t up for new spontaneous challenges would probably not enjoy the ViaVan environment as much.
Sabrina, ViaVan’s Client Success Manager “The Berlin team is absolutely passionate about what they are doing. It was great to visit them in their modern, open-plan office in central Berlin. I believe ViaVan is only starting with their urban transport revolution and I am excited to see them growing in Germany!”
Francesco, a former Pediatric Neurosurgeon, left his clinical post in 2010 to join McKinsey as a Consultant. In his near four years at McKinsey, he consulted for Pharmaceutical and medical device companies, health organisations, authorities and several hospitals across Europe, the US and the Middle East.
Since leaving McKinsey in 2014, Francesco moved to Dubai, founded a healthcare consulting company, accepted a director role for a large hospital group and created GulfSpecialists.com a marketplace platform helping doctors and other international healthcare professionals find the right work opportunities in the Gulf countries.
“That’s it, I quit!” Almost every doctor has at some point said they wanted to leave the medical profession. This is sometimes said out of stress or fatigue, sometimes out of a longstanding professional dissatisfaction, but in the vast majority of cases it does not translate into any concrete action, mainly because the long years of study to become a medical doctor represent a huge sunk cost that people aren’t easily willing to give away to pursue a new professional path. I am one of the few doctors who isn’t working as a doctor.
I changed tracks after getting my medical degree, going through the whole residency and practising neurosurgery for a while before changing. In this blog post, I try to explain the reasons why a medical professional might want to change his/her professional track, and why one might want to become a consultant.
SO WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO LEAVE CLINICAL MEDICINE?
I don’t love you anymore. The main reason why doctors want to leave medicine is that the passion they had at the beginning of their path has worn off, and they no longer feel excited about what they are doing. I was usually very bored of spending long hours in the surgical theatre and was not feeling inspired by operating anymore. On the other hand, I was usually very satisfied when I could interact with others, develop innovative solutions to problems on the ward, or manage the hospital’s resources. That was an early indicator that surgery was maybe not the path for me, and I was probably more fit for managerial roles. Medical practice is very demanding, and when the passion is gone some serious reflection is needed on what possibly to do instead.
Oh, the stress! Although it is a common understanding that doctors should be able to cope with emotional stress because of the nature of their job, the medical profession actually has an extremely high rate of burnout. This can be a driver for people to leave clinical practice. (Spoiler alert: it doesn’t always get better in consulting.)
Are you in it for the money? Being a doctor will normally give a decent earning more or less across the globe, but the financial implications of being a doctor vary widely depending on which geography one is practising in. Usually, a doctor’s pay level plateaus relatively early in the career and increments very slowly until very senior positions, so some medics seeking better compensation prefer to look elsewhere.
As a result of these drivers, there is an increasing number of medical doctors who choose to leave clinical practice and start different jobs. Although consulting might not be right for everyone who wishes to leave clinical practice, I personally found some very good reasons to become a consultant.
Keeping your options open. When I left neurosurgery I did not know what I wanted to be “when I grew up”. I felt I couldn’t commit just yet to a long-term profession, but I wanted to stay busy until I found the right career choice for me. Consulting is a very good way to postpone any long-term career decision, acquire diverse skills, increase one’s network, see what’s available out there, and it even looks good on your CV!
In what did you graduate again? A major advantage of consulting is that you don’t need any specific educational background to apply. Repositioning yourself professionally can be quite daunting when you’ve only done medicine for the previous twelve years. Although mainly seeking people with a business background, the largest consulting firms are open to people of all educational and professional backgrounds, and value the diversity this brings to the company. That is hugely important if you are looking to move away from the only thing you ever studied or worked in. Not to mention that your medical experience is a great asset if you end up consulting in the healthcare sector, which is usually the case.
Although saying one is a consultant doesn’t quite achieve the same effect at parties as to when you “drop the brain surgery bomb” (wink-wink – just kidding) consulting is widely considered as a prestigious profession to be in, especially if you are working for one of the global blue-chip consulting companies. When you’re looking for your first landing spot after medicine, going into something that can be considered at par with your previous job by the people looking at your CV is very important.
The learning and challenges. In my case, the moment I actually decided to leave surgery was when I realized I wasn’t learning in my job as much as I was learning in previous years studying for it. Consulting is a true goldmine of learning opportunities. The ever-changing business environment to which you are exposed, the different projects, problems and colleagues provide a wealth of opportunities to learn.
Career growth. Going into consulting for a while AND having deep sector knowledge in the medical field can put you in a very narrow sweet spot to compete for senior positions when you decide to leave consulting for a different industry.
Click here for more of our candidate’s unique career journeys
After spending 5 years working at Deloitte, Al Dea made the move from management consulting to become a Product Marketer at a tech company. In addition to working as a Product Marketing Manager, Al also is a career coach, he runs CareerSchooled, a career advice blog, and advises professionals including many consultants on career changes of their own.
This article is based on the main changes that he found when moving from consulting to an industry role.
AUTONOMY
In consulting, the work I had to do was dictated by the client, the project scope and more specifically the deliverables that were signed in the Statement of Work. There were clear deadlines and while there was some leeway in the team.
As a Product Marketing Manager in industry while I still have deadlines (ex: a product launch, customer presentation, training for salespeople) there’s also a lot of time when I have some flexibility and autonomy over the work I do. For instance, right now I have a few things that I have to do, but I also have some flexibility to pick certainly projects that I want to do, and I didn’t really have that choice when I worked in consulting.
CLIENT SERVICE
When you work in client service, if the client says jump, you say “how high?” This often meant racing to finish deliverables to hit deadlines, or working over the weekend to finish off a proposal/pitch to help a partner win new business.
The shift to industry has taken some of the daily pressure of this client service demands – and while I still do have some customer-facing responsibilities, there are fewer pressures to bend over backwards on a daily basis. Sure, there are still fire drills and things that unexpectedly come up, but it’s not necessarily baked into every single day of work.
DIVERSITY IN BACKGROUNDS
When you work at a consulting firm, you work with pretty much everyone who is a consultant. Sure there is difference and diversity but to a great extent, you are all cut from the same cloth. Working in industry I’ve found there to be a lot more diversity in terms of not only the roles but the mindset and skills of the people who have those roles or functions.
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In this article, we look through four trends that we’ve seen over the past few years:
– The changing needs of clients – Increased hiring of consultants in-house – The growth of large “one-stop-shop players” – The rise of smaller, more flexible consulting boutiques.
Finally, we look at the immediate reactions from strategy firms, as well as what we think is going to be required for the industry to avoid Levitt’s “Marketing Myopia”. Strategy firms have clearly started to adapt, but in an increasingly digital world, they need to think of delivery models beyond just throwing smart people and industry experience at the problem. To do this, they must fully embrace technology.
Finally, we look at the immediate reactions from strategy firms, as well as what we think is going to be required for the industry to avoid Levitt’s “Marketing Myopia”. Strategy firms have clearly started to adapt, but in an increasingly digital world, they need to think of delivery models beyond just throwing smart people and industry experience at the problem. To do this, they must fully embrace technology.
“MARKETING MYOPIA”
On the first day of our consulting “mini-MBA”, we were taught about marketing myopia – a term coined by Theodore Levitt. It explains the pitfalls of focusing on marketing strictly from the standpoint of selling a specific product rather than from the standpoint of fulfilling customer needs.
At some point in its development, every industry can be considered a growth industry, based on the apparent superiority of its product. But in case after case, industries have fallen under the shadow of mismanagement. What usually gets emphasized is selling, not marketing. This is a mistake, since selling focuses on the needs of the seller, while marketing concentrates on the needs of the buyer.
As I re-read this paragraph now, I can’t help but feel it’s a message to be heeded by strategy consulting firms. Having helped their clients to overcome marketing myopia for years, there are some strong indicators that the early “disruption” we’ve seen in consulting, has only just begun.
THE CHANGING CLIENT NEEDS
As the world’s online interactions continue to grow, the needs of a large proportion of clients have changed.
Firstly, the prevalence of data has changed clients’ needs. Previously, strategy consultancies were able to bring data from a market to a client. Insightful analysis of this would help identify trends and potential drivers of future change. Now, this data is not only far more readily available, but there are also far more internal data, which is often even more pertinent.
Secondly, companies have built up more in-house skills and tools. They are becoming more effective in using their data. Products are now built around data, rather than seeing what data comes out as they sell their products/ services. This helps companies to constantly iterate and evolve. Fast-growing tech corporates are constantly iterating strategies, at all levels in the business, directly as a consequence of better data and insight.
Thirdly, companies with a large online presence face very different challenges to more traditional industries. New worlds of UX, product management and Big Data are suddenly of critical focus.
Finally, with the constant threat of recession and low levels of GDP growth, clients are more budget constrained than previously. In years gone by, the promise of 10x Return on Investment was sufficient to defend the large up-front fees. However, with more constraints, clients are starting to look for more flexible models that can be delivered at a lower price.
INCREASED HIRING OF CONSULTANTS IN-HOUSE
There’s always been a steady flow of consultants into the “strategy” teams of corporates. In fact, most graduates choose consultancy to “open doors” in industry. Traditionally, consultants would make their first step into a strategic role, and then look to move into a commercial role when they understand the business fully and had built up the necessary stakeholder network.
However, what’s starting to change is consultants are being hired into non-strategy roles. As the skills of consultants (analytics; insight; communication to senior-level stakeholders) become required in more areas of the business, consultants are increasingly being hired into commercial/ operational roles straight out of consulting. Equally, as consultancy becomes more functionally specialized (i.e., supply chain consultants; tech strategy consultants), there are more obvious entry points.
This is a self-fulfilling prophecy: as more consultants are in these teams, they look to hire “what they know” (i.e., more consultants). As numbers increase, not only is there less “need” for external consultants, there is also more competition for this talent.
THE GROWTH OF LARGE ONE-STOP-SHOP ADVISORS
The largest growing strategy firms over the past few years have been at the Big 4. Through the acquisition, and hiring senior partners, they are building strategy teams out of alumni from the familiar strategy brands (i.e., hiring from McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Oliver Wyman, LEK; acquisitions of Booz and Company (PWC) and Monitor (Deloitte)).
The Big Four are able to boast an impressive point of difference: these strong strategic minds are backed up with scale. On the functional side, they become a one-stop-shop: use them as a trusted advisor across accounting, tax, legal, strategy and operations/ implementation consulting. This scale is positioned as not only offering a more connected, end-to-end solution but also as providing large savings in cost.
On the people side, their immense size means they have more flexibility. They can offer smaller projects, and more flexible models – as capacity can be more easily managed.
THE SMALLER, MORE FLEXIBLE BOUTIQUES AND FREELANCERS
The other exciting development is the rise of freelancers and small two to three-person boutiques. This has become a popular career choice, offering more flexibility and independence. At one end you have boutiques, who staff whole teams and are positioned as direct competitors of the strategy firms. What’s less publicized is the smaller boutiques and freelancers.
At Movemeon, we are seeing a lot of interest in either a junior manager resource (stand-alone; good stakeholder management skills) or putting together small teams (manager and two analysts) to deliver strategic projects. Whilst the cost of these projects might appear very different to a traditional strategy consulting project, the set-up and delivery might not be all that different. While it’s unlikely these small boutiques/ freelancers will attack the core of strategy consulting work (i.e., critical Board decisions), the periphery of work that has slowly built up over the years is very much in danger from this more flexible, cost-effective model.
HOW ARE STRATEGY FIRMS ADAPTING
There are some notable reactions to the changes in the market. Not only are we seeing a new series of business innovation models, but consulting firms are also looking at new ways to have access to a larger, more flexible workforce.
The new innovation business models were well documented in the HBR article “Consulting on the cusp of disruption” in October 2013. This trend has continued, with new implementation, operations, analytics, benchmarking “arms” to the top strategy firms. Typically these are operating under the strategy brand name (i.e., McKinsey Solutions; McKinsey Implementation), but there are a few subsidiaries (i.e., Finalta is a subsidiary of McKinsey focused on benchmarking in FS). These are going to continue to develop, and am sure are a large part of the disruption we are going to see.
However more recently, another interesting trend has occurred. Consultancies are starting to respond to the requirement for more flexible delivery models. No longer is the “manager plus 2” model as relevant to some situations. Clients need longer-term engagements, typically for less intense periods. As the work becomes more functionally based, it also becomes more entrenched with the business. As such, things will move more slowly. No longer is delivery seen as buy-in from the excess – it’s delivering change to these functional areas, which will always take longer to embed.
We’ve noticed two interesting trends in consultancies looking to offer more flexibility:
More flexible employment. The top-tier strategy firms are looking for innovative ways to keep talent. We’ve had a number of very interesting discussions around how consulting can become more flexible – this is to counteract losing great talent as a result of the lifestyle. Whether the 3-day working weeks or 7 months on 5 months off type models have more traction, will be interesting to see.
Freelancer pools. We’ve seen the strategy firms look to introduce “surge capacity”. At Movemeon we are currently working with 7 strategy firms to help them build “freelance pools”. These are pools of strategy consulting alumni, who are now freelance. This not only allows these firms to better manage utilization, but it also allows them to provide more flexible models of delivery to clients (i.e., longer-term; lower touch). This has traditionally been very hard to offer unless you have the scale of the Big 4.
CUSP OF DISRUPTION – WHAT DOES THE FUTURE FOR STRATEGY CONSULTANCIES HOLD?
Consultancies grew rapidly over the past two decades. As a result, the share of work that is classic strategy has been steadily decreasing and is now about 20%, down from 60% to 70% some 30 years ago, according to Tom Rodenhauser, the managing director of advisory services at Kennedy Consulting Research & Advisory (Consulting on Cusp of Disruption, HBR). If strategy consultancies are going to keep their current scale, they need to innovate to keep this non “classic-strategy” periphery.
Consulting has been on the cusp of disruption for two years now. Whilst there are clearly changes afoot, we think this is just the beginning. We expect to see further hollowing of the centre, with more specialized firms/ freelancers and continued consolidation of larger firms. We are also expecting freelance to continue its growth, and will increasingly take the more peripheral work from the larger consultancies.
However, for us, the most important change that needs to happen is more flexibility in delivery. Clients needs have changed. Whilst steps are being made to offer more than just traditional consulting teams – there needs to be more innovation. Consulting needs to move away from smart people helping to solve problems and embrace more technology – the ability to provide products for their clients to provide them with solutions to their problems.
Strategy consultancies can keep the “periphery” (non-classic strategy work) they have grown over the past few decades, by providing “products” that serve their clients over the long-term. Strategic advice can then take the form of shorter projects focused on solving particularly thorny issues. Given the exciting innovation and number of startups in the space, expect some acquisitions in the not too far future. Consultancies will start to see innovative products not only as high-margin delivery lines but as critical to continuing to provide their high-end advice.
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