Associate Consultant

Associate Consultant at Horizon Strategy

Horizon is a specialist boutique consultancy helping global technology businesses develop strategy and put it into action.

We’re hiring an Associate Consultant to join our generalist track, helping technology businesses including HP, Meta and Qualcomm answer difficult strategic questions.

You will bring sharp analytical thinking, creative problem-solving, uncanny attention to detail and a real appetite for technology. You take pride in finishing what you start and want to understand what your work means for the client’s business.

You will learn directly from founders and senior practitioners, get close to senior client conversations and, as Horizon grows rapidly, earn responsibility early.

Full-time | Graduate / early career | London (Hammersmith), hybrid | £40,000 to £50,000 plus bonus | Reports to Consultant / Senior Consultant

Technology companies are making bigger bets, faster.

AI is reshaping products, business models and how people buy, multiplying both possibilities and noise. The right moves are harder to judge, and mistakes cost more.

Real human insight and original thinking help businesses stand out. Recycling generic AI-enabled data pulls competitors towards the same predictable answers.

We are winning new global technology clients and moving upstream, working with leadership teams on decisions that shape their businesses. Joining now means helping shape Horizon’s next stage and growing with it.

Why Horizon

More commercially minded than traditional research boutiques. More grounded in human reality than large strategy houses.

Commercial Empathy combines deep human understanding with sharp commercial judgement. We look beyond what people say to understand why they choose and what will shift their behaviour.

For you, that means learning to connect what people need with what makes a business successful. You will see how evidence becomes advice, how experienced consultants challenge a client’s thinking and what earns their trust.

The problems you'd be working on

Much of our work is in B2B technology, often with hardware at its core. We explore how people work, where technology falls short and which improvements customers will pay for. That can mean understanding where on-device AI earns its place, how services make a hardware offer more valuable, or what channel partners need to sell it effectively. Users, IT teams and budget-holders often want different things. We work through those tensions to help clients decide what to build, how to price it and how to take it to market.

• Customer journey and experience:identify where investment will change a customer’s decision and have the greatest impact
• Portfolio strategy:rebuild a technology portfolio around how buyers choose and where the client makes money
• Product and pricing strategy:turn customer workflows into product roadmaps and identify which features earn a premium
• Go-to-market strategy:decide how to position an offer, reach buyers through partners and make the message land
• Competitive strategy:test competitors’ promises against the experience they deliver and find where the client can win

Your part in the work

Working closely with a Consultant or a Senior Consultant, you will own defined tasks and outputs, with clear briefs, regular feedback and increasing independence as your judgement develops.

• Research and fieldwork:investigate markets and competitors, adapt discussion guides, screeners and survey questions within an agreed approach, and conduct interviews with preparation and coaching
• Analysis and insight:analyse interview evidence, survey data and secondary sources, identify patterns, investigate contradictions and suggest what the findings mean for the client and what they could do next
• Story and deliverables:build clear sections within an agreed storyline, using evidence and visual hierarchy well and checking the argument, numbers, sources and detail before review
• Client and project support:prepare workshop materials, capture decisions and follow through on actions, present your part of the work and flag questions or risks that need senior input
• Building with AI:use AI to build dashboards, tools and prototypes that help clients explore findings and help the team work better, testing them with colleagues and refining them through feedback

Horizon Navigator

We are building Horizon Navigator with the ambition to reinvent how businesses get strategic advice. It combines AI, human insight and Horizon’s commercial judgement. Working with experienced colleagues, you will help build and test prototypes, challenge their answers against research evidence and turn ideas from client work into features worth developing.

Who you are

You are a business builder at heart: curious about how businesses succeed and driven to turn ideas into something useful.

You may be finishing a degree or already have some relevant experience. What you have taken responsibility for, and how well, matters.

Your experience and craft

• You have, or are completing, a degree from a leading university and a strong academic record. Your subject matters less than the quality of your thinking and your interest in business and technology
• You can make sense of unfamiliar information, work confidently with qualitative evidence and numbers, and distinguish a supported conclusion from an assumption
• You ask thoughtful questions, listen closely and can draw useful meaning from what people say. You are keen to develop interviewing skills and learn how qualitative and quantitative evidence work together
• You write precisely, present a coherent argument and care about how it looks on the page. You can work confidently with spreadsheets and presentation tools and check your work before handing it over
• You have taken something from an idea to a finished result, whether a venture, society, event, product or personal project. You can explain your contribution and what you did when things became difficult
• You have built something useful with AI:a tool, prototype, workflow or service. You can explain the problem it solves, what you personally built, how you tested it and where it fell short. Coding ability is a bonus

How you think and work

• You think deeply:you take time to understand a question, test its assumptions and explain your reasoning
• You listen properly:you absorb feedback, ask when something is unclear and act on what you learn without immediately defending yourself
• You combine reason with creativity:you find fresh angles, then test whether they stand up to the evidence
• You make yourself clear:you can explain a complicated idea without hiding behind jargon or losing what matters
• You organise yourself:you plan your work, juggle competing tasks and raise risks early. If you make a mistake, you say so and help put it right
• You live and breathe technology:you follow developments beneath the headline and want to understand how businesses and consumers adopt it
• You care about the result:you follow through, help colleagues and ask what your work needs to achieve for the client

We will ask for examples from study, work or life outside them. Fluent English is essential. German, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin or French are useful.

One level up:a Consultant owns a workstream with less day-to-day direction. Progression means showing that independence and quality consistently.

Life at Horizon

The bar is high because the opportunity is unusually large.

Our colleagues care deeply about the work and one another, move quickly and hold each other to an exacting standard. You will receive direct coaching, regular feedback and training through live projects and specialist courses. Senior colleagues stay close enough to teach you how good work is done. Meet that standard consistently, and you can earn greater responsibility and progress quickly towards Consultant.

That opportunity asks a lot of you. Most clients are in the US. Some weeks include calls over dinner and weekend work, particularly around international fieldwork and major deadlines. Not every week, but it is part of the job. We need people who embrace that commitment and the pace of learning it brings.

Your first year

These milestones let you hold us to account as much as we hold you.

• In your first 90 days, you will contribute to a live project, complete defined research and analysis tasks, produce client-ready pages with review and learn through interviews and client discussions
• By six months, you will conduct interviews with preparation and feedback, analyse a defined body of evidence and present your findings internally and in appropriate client sessions
• By twelve months, you will own defined research, analysis and deliverable tasks with increasing independence, manage your time reliably and have helped build or improve a tool or way of working that the team uses

The package

• Base salary of £40,000 to £50,000, depending on experience
• Bonus scheme linked to individual contribution and company performance
• Participation in an employee equity scheme
• Full-time hybrid working:three days in our Hammersmith office and two days flexible
• Company pension and Bupa private medical insurance
• 23 days’ holiday plus bank holidays and your birthday off
• Direct coaching and mentoring from founders and senior practitioners, with specialist training and a learning budget
• Access to the latest AI tools and platforms