Medicine or consulting?

From what you state in the comments, I'd recommend going with Medicine. Unless you are 100% committed to staying in the Big 4 or doing similar tech strategy work, you'll A. be beholden to the politics around you to succeed longterm; B. be surpassed by those who are technically more competent even if their soft skills are less defined; C. make less income over your lifetime and have a [potentially] less diversified income stream.

A/B. You don't strike me as being particularly technical, or being interested in growing that aspect of your background. Not everyone needs to be a software engineer, but your ability to fail in technical projects is often reduced when you deeply understand components. No just how they live on a server, but how they'll be integrated across enterprises, how they're synergetic with the application portfolios of various key stakeholders whom you can leverage to share funding for large-scale products in ways that both drop costs and increase capabilities, etc. This type of knowledge makes people excellent within a technical enterprise.

It's not just: "Here's the powerpoint model for divestment within XYZ in order to afford the new capabilities within ABC". It is: "This motherfucker over there is afraid if you implement Microsoft Dynamics over here for the salespeople and support, that the CIO will pull the specially-allocated funding for his Salesforce pilot for marketing automation". The typical strategy consultant (where I work) will develop a really shitty powerpoint outlining the strengths and weaknesses based off of googled information outlining the costs and capabilities of each product in a matrix, while articulating the cost to migrate. A smart technical consultant will do all that too, and spend a few days developing a proof of concept virtual machine appliance that shows how you can integrate both applications to query/update each other's data in ways that allows both silos to continue their operations. Whether it's done hands-on or architected by the resource and given to a solutions engineer to develop, these types of quandaries are really what enable people to hit the ground running.

C. Honestly, you can probably make an assload more money within medicine. Your average salary will be the same as Director and Partner levels, and be achieved faster. The leverage also falls back into your hands. Within consulting your big-firm options are limited and require you to put up with that shit for years on end, you may have a few bad years progressing slowly due to market mechanisms you can't control, bad projects, bad leaders, or performance "not on par" with the best within your group (see A/B). At my Big firm, MDs on average have at least 15 years. With medicine, you can go anywhere, do anything. You can be in a hospital, a practice, a clinic, in charity, or be a consultant. Yes, doctors can be consultants too! And guess what, they can charge bookoo fucking bucks to do it. Thinking about it in this way, you haven't wasted your current work experience. In fact, it taught you valuable skills about working with organizational leaders and breaking apart common business problems. In medicine, you'll probably decide to get an MBA later on in life just to augment these skills of yours and leverage them into using the spare liquidity from your massive salary into an investment portfolio of businesses (medical equipment import/export/sales, medical consulting, computing in medicine and software development, etc.). I know a guy who went to Dubai on a year-long contract as his first job after medical school, making $500,000 with other perks. On the other hand, excellent software engineers and technical consultants (who are technically trained) with years of experience will make $250,000-350,000 within that same labor market.

Just a few things to consider.

/r/consulting Thread