McKinsey & Co. #1 in Consulting for Eighth Straight Year, Says Vault

Business Wire, August 19, 2008

Annual Consulting Survey Reveals McKinsey #1 Again; Re-emergence of Big Four Consulting

NEW YORK -- Career information media company Vault.com, Inc. (www.vault.com) has just released the latest edition of the Vault Guide to the Top 50 Management and Strategy Consulting Firms, and for the eighth straight year McKinsey & Company takes the #1 spot.

As part of Vault's annual Strategy Consulting Survey, from February through April of this year, over 4,000 consultants rated consulting firms on a scale of 1 to 10 based on prestige (they were unable to rate their own firms, and asked to only rate firms with which they were familiar). According to survey respondents, McKinsey, home to the "best minds," still upholds "the gold standard in consulting." They claim that due to the "unparalleled" and "super-smart" people, "there is no better place to be a consultant."

The top 10 firms as ranked in the Vault Guide to the Top 50 Management and Strategy Consulting Firms are:

1. McKinsey & Company             <
New York, NY
2. The Boston Consulting Group, Inc.  <
Boston, MA
3. Bain & Company                 <
Boston, MA
4. Booz & Company                 <
New York, NY
5. Monitor Group                      <
Cambridge, MA
6. Mercer LLC                         <
New York, NY
7. Deloitte                           <
New York, NY
8. Oliver Wyman                       <
New York, NY
9. PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP         <
New York, NY
10. L.E.K. Consulting                 <
London

The top 20 firms in 2009 look similar to last year's group; however, the addition of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, Ernst & Young LLP and KPMG LLP to the guide has forced some reshuffling among the ranks. For their first year back on the circuit, the firms ranked #9, #11 and #16, respectively.

These Big Four firms had separated their consulting divisions from their audit and accounting wings back at the turn of the century, in the wake of the Enron scandal and the tightening of SEC independence regulations. Since the non-compete agreements between these firms and their spin-offs came to an end in 2007, they have thrown themselves at the task of rebuilding their consulting divisions, and this year the consulting and advisory services were the fastest growing service lines for all three firms. With this growth, it seemed like a natural choice to reintroduce the firms into the Vault Guide to the Top 50 Management and Strategy Consulting Firms.

"Even though a lot of survey respondents are portraying these firms as coming back from the dead, and not yet integral to the strategy consulting market, there's a real sense that they're quickly getting reacquainted with the industry and asserting themselves accordingly," says Naomi Newman, Vault's global consulting editor. "By virtue of them ranking so well in terms of prestige in their first year back gives us a glimpse into how other consultants view these firms and their potential. It will be interesting to watch their strategy and positioning develop in the market over the next few years."

In addition to the top prestige rankings, the Vault Guide to the Top 50 Management and Strategy Consulting Firms features quality of life rankings for firms, in categories such as compensation, training, hours, offices and diversity, straight from employees that work there. The guide also contains profiles that give readers an insider's perspective of each firm, revealing information on recent projects, revenue, uppers and downers of working for the firm, employment contacts and "The Buzz,"--overall perceptions of each firm. The Vault Guide to the Top 50 Management and Strategy Consulting Firms is available at bookstores nationwide or by ordering through Vault.com.

To see Vault's top consulting rankings, please CLICK HERE. All categories of quality of life, practice area and diversity rankings are available to Vault Gold subscribers.

To order the guide online, please CLICK HERE.

About Vault.com

Vault is the leading media company focused on careers. Vault is celebrated for its online resource, www.vault.com, which features thousands of company and university profiles, information on hundreds of occupations and industries, articles on a multitude of workplace topics, a network of message boards for professionals with over 2,200,000 posts and jobs-related video, blogs and research tools. Vault offers over 120 online and print books, from the best-selling Vault Guide to the Top 100 Law Firms to the Vault Guide to Schmoozing. The company's clients include nearly 1,000 advertisers and recruiters, over 1,000 universities and graduate schools and over 7,000,000 consumers worldwide. Maintaining offices in New York, London, Mumbai, and Hong Kong, Vault was founded in 1996 by Hussam Hamadeh, Samer Hamadeh, and Mark Oldman and recently received a majority investment from Veronis Suhler Stevenson, a $5 billion private-equity firm focused on media and communications.