Economics in the Workplace: Consulting Internship at Deloitte

Okay, so as you are reading this, you may or may not have been sold on ESSA’s mission and vision to show how economics helps you in the industry. During this article, I would like to cement the view that economics helps in the workforce.

During the summer, I joined Deloitte for my internship, in Consulting (Strategy and Operations). This was a great experience and really helped to put to use the theories and skills we learn at university. During my project, there was a lot of economics, finance and accounting. However, economics really made it easier to decipher and get through the relevant tasks throughout the project.

With consulting, there are many approaches you can take. There are those who try to take and have a specified plan, and then ‘do’ while finding and fixing problems all the way. This type of thinking and practical application seems to be used more nowadays, as this is the way we can develop models upon reflection and also how we identify what information we need specifically to ask clients and/or decipher from the information we already have. The other way is to develop a model and thinking process before tackling the problem. This gives a holistic approach to the problem and especially if you are a manager, can allow you to micro manage and allow for efficiency. Both methods are taught to us, especially when we learn how models are developed in later years.

Not only that, but especially in consulting, there are certain cases where you have to promote efficiency in the organisation and thus economics comes into play. Economics in early years is about finding points in production where we achieve maximum profits with an optimal amount of inputs. In industry, this is what firms try to achieve, albeit on a larger scale and through different methods. However, especially for me and a lot of the other members of ESSA, we saw that learning the concept of maximisation of utility and efficiency is helpful.

Therefore, no matter what the situation is, in industry and most jobs you will encounter, the thinking that economics instils in the individual will always be useful. For both strategy and operations, finance and economics will be your most useful tools. Thus you must heed the message we provide, you may thank us one day for it!