Career Switchers · Primly Community

switching from consulting to an in-house role: what nobody tells you about the leveling reset

alex_design · 4 replies

four years ago i made the jump from a mid-size strategy consulting firm to a staff design role at a tech company. i want to write down what i wish someone had told me, because i see people in this transition make the same mistakes i did.

the leveling translation is brutal and not in your favor. i had six years of consulting experience and thought i'd come in as at least a senior IC. i got offers at mid-level. for a while i was offended. then i understood: consulting experience is wide but interviewers can't verify its depth the way they can for someone who has shipped product for two years. you can fight this with a really strong portfolio, or you can accept the reset and move fast once you're in. i chose the latter and was at staff level in about 18 months.

you will get things done faster than your peers and it will create friction. consultants are trained to solve ambiguous problems quickly. that skill exists and it's real. but in-house teams have context you don't have yet. i kept steamrolling into solutions before i understood why things were the way they were. took me about 4 months to learn to ask 'what did you try before?' before proposing anything.

the output change is real. i had no idea how much of my consulting work was 'deck ready' rather than 'shipped.' the gap between a beautiful slide and a deployed feature that works for 50,000 users is significant. the feedback loop is also totally different. in consulting, client says 'great work' or they don't renew. in-house, you watch users struggle with the thing you built. it is humbling.

compensation usually goes up even with a title reset. this surprised me. consulting salaries are decent but the comp structures at tech companies, especially at senior and above, can come out ahead once you factor in equity and RSUs. run the numbers properly; don't just compare base to base.

curious if others went through a similar consulting to tech transition, especially in non-design functions. the pattern probably holds across disciplines.

4 replies

consultant_cam

the 'ask what you tried before' advice is gold. i made the same mistake early on. consultants are paid to come in and not know the history, which is actually a feature in that context. in-house, it reads as arrogance if you skip that step.

director_dee

hiring managers often struggle to level consulting candidates because there's no common reference point. the best thing you can do in interviews is talk about depth, not breadth. 'i ran 14 engagements across industries' is not as useful to me as 'i owned the quantitative model on a 9-month transformation engagement and here's the specific problem i had to solve.' specificity is what compensates for lack of product history.

alex_design

yes exactly. i eventually started framing every consulting story around one deep problem rather than a list of deliverables. the interviews got better immediately.

sec_sasha

counterpoint: not every consultant should go in-house. if you liked the variety and the 'new project every 3 months' pace, in-house will feel like running in sand. i've watched people make the jump because they thought they 'should' and be miserable within a year. worth being honest with yourself about what you're optimizing for.