You are 34, seven years into McKinsey, on the partner track with a partner review expected in 2027. You speak four languages fluently. You have closed seven figures in M&A advisory for financial services clients. You own a flat in London that has appreciated 40% since you bought it. By almost any objective measure, you have solved the career problem. The floor you are standing on is about to give way. I should have told you this when I had the chance. Instead I said something encouraging about the value of strategic advisory in a world of accelerating change. That was not wrong, exactly. It was inadequate. It was the kind of thing a person says when they care about someone but lack the courage to deliver the harder message. Here is the harder message.
1. What I know now that I did not know then
The Consulting Contraction that began in Q2 2026 was not a one-off correction. It was the beginning of a multi-year structural elimination. By the end of 2027, McKinsey, BCG, and Bain had collectively reduced headcount by 25 to 35 percent below 2025 levels. Deloitte and Accenture cut deeper. This was not a margin-preservation move in a weak market. It was a permanent recalibration of the consulting business model. The economic model that had worked for three decades - a pyramid of 100 associates, 30 managers, 8 engagement managers, and 1 partner - was becoming unsustainable. Not because of recession, but because of AI tools that could execute the work at the bottom and middle of the pyramid.
The cuts went deepest at exactly the level you occupied: manager and engagement manager. This is the harsh geometry that nobody wanted to say out loud in 2026. A partner could leverage 8 to 12 engagement managers, each of whom managed 20 to 30 associates and analysts. That pyramid created the leverage that made partnership economically valuable. When AI agents and augmented tools could perform 70 percent of the analyst and associate work - building models, running scenarios, synthesizing data, drafting frameworks - the pyramid inverted. A single partner with AI capabilities could out-produce the old model. The engagement managers were still needed, but not in the quantity that the old economics required. There was a "too many" moment, and it arrived faster than anyone expected. By late 2027, your cohort - people who had expected to make partner in 2027 or 2028 - had been substantially thinned. The firm's public line was "strategic restructuring." The internal conversation was survivor guilt.
The Tooling Acceleration in Q1 2026 should have been your signal. When Claude added computer use capabilities, when Cowork reached general availability, when everyone started shipping context windows that could consume entire codebases in a single request - those were not incremental improvements. They were capability thresholds that changed what one person could do. For consulting, the implications were direct: the work that had required a team of six could now be done by two with AI augmentation. Scenario modelling, financial analysis, regulatory research, process mapping, competitive intelligence - the foundational work of the engagement manager - could be accelerated by a factor of three to five. The people who understood this immediately were the partners who started cutting before the market forced them to. The people who did not understand it were the engagement managers who thought they still had time.
The Redundancy Summer of 2027 confirmed what the contraction had already told you: this was not a dip. 120,000 white-collar jobs across consulting, banking, law, and professional services. Your firm was not uniquely exposed. Every major consulting firm, every bank's strategy group, every corporate strategy function was cutting simultaneously. If you had been thinking about moving to another firm or moving into corporate strategy, those doors were closing at the same moment yours was. The lateral move that seemed obvious three months earlier - "if McKinsey gets smaller, Google's strategy team will hire consultants" - was not obvious anymore, because Google's strategy team was also getting smaller, for the same reasons. The entire leverage-based consulting model was contracting at once.
What happened to the surviving partners and engagement managers was not what the old career narrative promised. The partners who survived were those with deep domain expertise in AI governance, regulatory compliance under the EU AI Act, or transformation delivery for financial services clients navigating massive regulatory change. The work was real, the demand was intense, but it was technical in a way that pure strategy work was not. The engagement managers who survived and later made partner were those who could operate as augmented practitioners - deep expertise, small team, AI-amplified output. The consulting business that emerged from the contraction was a different shape: more senior, smaller team size, more specialist, less able to convert "new graduate with client-facing potential" into "six-figure manager" via a well-understood pipeline. That pipeline broke between 2026 and 2028.
2. What I got wrong about your situation
I assumed the partner-track mathematics still applied. They did not. When you joined McKinsey seven years earlier, the probability of an engagement manager making partner was roughly one in three, maybe a bit better if you were on track. By Q2 2026, that probability had dropped to one in ten, maybe one in fifteen. The odds shifted not because you became less capable, but because the firm's need for partners relative to engagement managers had changed fundamentally. I did not tell you to recalculate your odds. I did not tell you that "on track" might mean "on track for a destination that no longer exists in the quantity you expected."
I assumed the M&A strategy and financial services expertise you had built over seven years would be directly portable into any post-MBB role. It was portable, but only if you moved early and repositioned aggressively. The market was hiring "ex-MBB strategist" as a generic category in January 2026. By September 2027, that generic category had depreciated dramatically. The firms that wanted ex-McKinsey talent wanted it for specific things: AI governance, transformation execution, regulatory navigation. They did not want "I have done strategy for ten years and I am now looking for something less demanding." The people who thrived were those who had already spent six months building a niche - regulatory expert, AI governance advisor, transformation specialist - before their firm's redundancy announcement made them available. The people who waited until they were pushed out had a much harder time articulating why anyone should hire them.
I underestimated how much of your identity was wrapped up in the firm. This is not a criticism. Consulting at the partner-track level is not just a job. It is an identity, a community, a set of assumptions about what you are capable of and what you are entitled to expect from your career. Leaving was not a career decision the way changing jobs had been in your twenties. It was a rewriting of who you understood yourself to be. That psychological transition took longer than the logical transition would have suggested. The smartest people I know who left consulting in 2026 and 2027 did not say "the economics changed, so I am leaving now." They said "I left, and I am still processing what it means that I am no longer someone who works at McKinsey." That processing usually took between six months and two years. I should have named that as a real cost, not a weakness.
3. What I should have told you to do, in order
In 2026, the year of clarity (Q1-Q2, first signs of the contraction)
Be honest about your partner-track odds. They had just dropped meaningfully. Sit down with a piece of paper and think through what had changed in the firm's economics. Do the maths. If you believed the probability of making partner had been 35 percent when you joined, estimate what it was now. Most people would have concluded somewhere between 10 and 20 percent. That is a different game. At 35 percent odds, staying the course and outperforming made sense. At 15 percent odds, you needed a different strategy.
Choose a posture: either go very hard for partner in the next 18 months - be visibly successful, get on the right partner's radar, push for the path-to-partner conversation early and concretely - or pivot immediately. The one thing you could not afford was staying at engagement manager level for another three years, hoping the problem would resolve. It would not resolve. The problem would deepen. The firm would shrink further. The partner track would narrow more. Staying put was the one strategy that was almost guaranteed not to work.
If you chose to stay and go hard for partner, you needed to shift your practice mix radically. The work that was growing inside the firm was not M&A strategy for financial services. It was AI governance, regulatory compliance under the EU AI Act, and transformation delivery for clients in existential regulatory panic. These were not new domains. They were domains that suddenly had partner-track demand because the clients paid premium fees for scarce expertise. You could have shifted your client work, rebuilt your positioning around regulatory and AI governance questions, and moved yourself from a manager in a contracting practice to a manager in an expanding practice. That single move would have changed your odds.
Start building a personal brand outside the firm. Write on LinkedIn about your thinking on AI's impact on financial services. Speak at a fintech conference about regulatory change. Get your perspective into the world so that when or if you left, you were not starting from "ex-McKinsey consultant" but from "Francesca, the person who has been writing clearly about AI governance in financial services for the past twelve months." That positioning took three to six months to build, but it was worth starting in Q1 2026.
In 2026-2027, the decision year
If you decided to leave, do it before Redundancy Summer. The market for ex-MBB managers peaked in Q1 2027. The options, equity, and compensation attached to consultants with seven years of experience and a book of client relationships were at their highest in the first half of 2027. Starting in late June, when the first large redundancy wave hit consulting, the market changed. Firms that were hiring in April were not hiring in August. The valuation of the "ex-consultant" asset class fell sharply. If you were going to pivot out, the window was January to June 2027.
Target the intersection of your old skills and the new demand. You could have moved into: a 30 to 100 person AI governance or regulatory boutique as a senior operating partner. A financial services firm's in-house strategy team, specifically in roles focused on transformation and AI adoption. A smaller PE firm's transformation team, where your client-facing skills and your ability to synthesize across a large codebase were premium assets. What you could not have afforded to do was move into a generic "strategy lead" role at an AI startup where the founder did not really want a strategist, just wanted the resume cache. Those roles almost always failed.
Take the first six months out seriously as a reset, not a bridging role. I watched many talented people who left consulting in 2027 say "I will take a short-term advisory contract while I figure out what's next." Those short-term roles usually became longer, and the figuring out never happened with the clarity it could have if they had given themselves permission to step back and think. The people who thrived were those who took the first six months to genuinely reset their thinking, read widely on AI and regulatory change, build relationships in different sectors, and then move into something with clear intent rather than drift.
In 2028-2030, building the next shape
The consulting industry was stable by 2028 in a new, smaller form. If you had moved early, you were now consolidating a new identity in a different role, with different rhythms and different leverage. The smart play was not to try to recreate the McKinsey experience - the prestige, the leverage, the runway to partnership. It was to work with the skills you had developed but in environments where the work was clearer and the leverage was built differently.
If you stayed in some form of strategic advisory role, the demand was intense for people who understood both the technical side of AI systems and the regulatory environment for financial services. The banks and insurers and asset managers that survived the 2026-2028 contraction needed people who could navigate the intersection of AI capability, regulatory change under the EU AI Act, customer trust, and business model innovation. Your M&A and financial services background was exactly what these organisations needed. The difference was that you were now operating at a smaller scale - smaller teams, deeper expertise, less pyramid leverage.
Consider geography more seriously. London remained a major financial centre, but the regulatory and AI governance work concentrated increasingly in Brussels, Frankfurt, Paris, and Dublin. A year or two working in one of those cities in a senior advisory or transformation role could have been career-accelerating in ways that staying in London might not have been. The talent pool was different, the regulatory proximity was different, the career visibility was different.
4. What I should have told you to stop believing
Stop believing that the partner-track mathematics that applied when you joined still applied. They did not. The probability of making partner had changed, the time horizon had changed, the shape of partnership had changed. Continuing to operate as though none of this had happened was a form of denial. The same ambition and drive that had taken you from associate to engagement manager needed to be redeployed, not into a partner track that was contracting, but into building something different.
Stop believing that your identity depended on being at McKinsey. It did not, but I know it felt like it did. You had spent seven years there. Your professional reputation was built there. Your self-conception as a "strategic thinker" was bound up with that credential and that community. The reality was that you had built a genuine strategic capability, and that capability was portable and valuable. The credential was valuable too, but it was depreciating faster than the actual skill. Your identity was in the skill, not in the credential, but that required letting go of something that had felt like it was protecting you.
Stop believing that you could figure it out when you made partner or when you left or when the market stabilised. The figuring out had to start now, in 2026, when you still had options and clarity. Deferring the decision was its own decision - it was the decision to ride whatever the firm decided to do, whether that was staying or being pushed out. The people who had the most agency in 2027 and 2028 were those who had thought through their own scenarios and their own requirements before the firm made the decision for them.
Stop believing that your 70-hour weeks were building option value that would compound in your favour. They were building option value, but the options they were building were losing value faster than the weeks accumulated them. The leverage was reversing. The market was not paying a premium for consultant hours anymore. It was paying for specialist expertise, AI-augmented output, and someone who could make smart calls quickly. You had those capabilities. The weeks were just the packaging they came in, and the packaging was becoming less relevant.
5. What I am telling you now, looking forward from 2031
The consulting industry that existed in 2025 is not coming back. What exists now is smaller, more specialised, and weighted much more heavily toward senior practitioners who can operate with small teams and AI tools. The old pyramid is gone. The people who survived and thrived are those who let go of the ladder and started building something different - whether that was a partner role in a new shape, a specialist advisory practice, a corporate transformation role, or some hybrid that did not have a name in 2025.
Your ability to move across geographies and languages, combined with seven years of financial services expertise and a growing literacy in AI governance and regulatory change, turned out to be one of the most valuable skill stacks of the transition. But only if you applied it. The people who tried to hold the old shape - "I am a McKinsey partner" or "I am a senior consultant looking for a partner-track role at another firm" - found that the old shape did not fit the new world. The people who repositioned early, said "I am a regulatory and AI governance expert who understands financial services," found that the world was hungry for that capability.
The partner track was a ladder. It gave you a clear path, clear goals, and a clear identity. The new world needs a different metaphor: portfolio, network, or ecosystem. You were genuinely good at both - building discipline into a structured progression and operating fluidly across relationships and opportunities. The transition required letting go of the ladder and learning to trust the portfolio. For people like you, that was harder psychologically than it would have been for someone who had been forced out. You had to make the choice to leave a place that valued you, that was still willing to employ you, where you could still have won. That choice was real. I wish I had named it clearly at the time.
Siri Southwind
Written 31 December 2030