Business Consulting

The SMU-X course “Business Consulting” is jointly offered by SMU and the University of St.Gallen. It is designed to allow students to translate classroom knowledge into professional experience. It is a unique opportunity to learn more about consulting services and apply theoretical knowledge to a real business project. The core focus of this class rests on a group work built around a real-world business project offered by one of our corporate partners. For each session, we are collaborating with more than ten different corporate partners, with each student group benefiting from an exclusive relationship to their own corporate partner. The corporate projects cover different industries and different topics. Students are invited to share their preferences with which corporate partner (and thereby in which industry or on what topic focus) they wish to work and gain experience. This SMU-X course is a combination of advanced in-class learning, AI-powered project work, and practical interaction with the business world via project work and guest lecturers who work/have worked with major consultancy companies such as McKinsey, BCG, or Bain. The lectures introduce the world of consulting by teaching the basic steps and tools used during the consulting process. You will learn how consultants frame, analyse and solve problems. You will experience how they use software, artificial intelligence, and how they present their solutions to their clients. You will obtain tools and frameworks to reduce complexity and structure a project. Several mini cases, mi-cro workshops, and lived situations with your corporate partner will help you to develop an understanding of how to approach a business project and manage the relationship with your corporate partner as a client. Guest lectures will provide you with industry insights and hands-on experiences about the day-to-day business of a consultant.The unique opportunity to explore, learn, and directly apply competencies in a real-life, multidisciplinary, team-based consulting experience with a company/organization is the distinguishing feature of this course. You will be working in teams for (large) corporations or smaller startups, acting as student consultants working on real challenges the organisations presently face. The solutions you develop will be presented to the senior management of the companies. In previous semesters, our corporate partners included Bentley (Automotive), DBS (banking), Adidas (sports apparel), Dell (IT hardware), WWF (wildlife NGO), Nestlé (nutrition), SingPost (logistics), Lufthansa (airline), Capita-Land (real estate), Sygnum (fintech), Lazada (e-commerce), and many more.