Junior Associate - Private Capital

Your Growth

Driving lasting impact and building long-term capabilities with our clients is not easy work. You are the kind of person who thrives in a high performance/high reward culture - doing hard things, picking yourself up when you stumble, and having the resilience to try another way forward. In return for your drive, determination, and curiosity, we will provide the resources, mentorship, and opportunities you need to become a stronger leader faster than you ever thought possible. Your colleagues—at all levels—will invest deeply in your development, just as much as they invest in delivering exceptional results for clients. Every day, you will receive apprenticeship, coaching, and exposure that will accelerate your growth in ways you won’t find anywhere else.

When you join us, you will have:

• Continuous learning: Our learning and apprenticeship culture, backed by structured programs, is all about helping you grow while creating an environment where feedback is clear, actionable, and focused on your development.
• A voice that matters: From day one, we value your ideas and contributions. You’ll make a tangible impact by offering innovative ideas and practical solutions.
• Global community: With colleagues across 65+ countries and over 100 different nationalities, our firm’s diversity fuels creativity and helps us come up with the best solutions for our clients.
• World-class benefits: On top of a competitive salary, we provide a comprehensive benefits package, which includes medical, dental, mental health, and vision coverage for you, your spouse/partner, and children.

Your Impact

You will work in teams of typically 3-5 consultants to support private investor clients and their portfolio companies throughout the deal lifecycle, including on diligence, value creation topics and exit support. You will have the opportunity to assess and identify market attractiveness, provide targeted information and specialized financial analysis on potential acquisitions, prepare and deliver high-impact verbal and written communication of your synthesized findings.

You will also have the opportunity to work directly with portfolio companies on their value creation agenda, spanning a diverse set of topics, and you will be a subject matter expert on topics related to our service to investors. You will be recognized as a valuable resource of experience, information and expertise both inside the firm and by our clients.

As a Private Capital Consultant, you will receive training and coaching on how to better:

• Structure ambiguous problems and take action to solve them.
• Synthesize clear takeaways from complex information into clear takeaways and recommendations using both qualitative and quantitative methods.
• Work effectively with diverse teams to come up with the best solution and move people and organizations to act.
• Establish trust-based relationships with clients to better serve their organizations.
• Communicate effectively with all audiences, including senior leaders, in a structured manner.
• Develop your leadership style, leveraging your own passions, strengths, and personal values.

McKinsey believes in strengths-based development and coaching, and you will receive frequent mentoring from colleagues. This will include a senior colleague from your office or practice who will help you grow and achieve your career goals. Additionally, you will have a professional development manager who manages staffing to help you choose projects based on your priorities as well as the needs of client service teams.

When you join McKinsey, you are joining a firm that will invest in your professional development. During your first few years with the firm, you will serve on multiple client engagements and work with a number of colleagues and clients in a range of private investor settings, across different industry and functional areas and develop significant business experience, as well as an investor mindset.

This role differs from McKinsey’s Generalist Junior Associate / Associate role in its focus. This role focuses entirely on serving investor clients and their portfolio companies. Private Capital consultants will be staffed full time to client engagements. There is flexibility to hire at either Junior Associate or Associate level, depending on experience.

You will join the Private Capital practice in our London office to work in teams and directly with our clients. Our practice is a world leading advisor to private equity and institutional investors, and a high growth area for the firm, working with many of the most significant global and local private investors and their portfolio companies.

In this role you will help our clients and their portfolio companies, across the deal lifecycle – working on transactions, and value creation topics (including strategy, digital business building, commercial excellence, and many more). You will also work with the wider McKinsey network, including a range of experts in the firm, from industry and functional experts to data scientists to researchers to software and app designers.

Your qualifications and skills:

• Undergraduate degree or master’s degree with between 3-5 years of full-time working experience after completing your degree.
• Previous experience in a PE environment with exposure to transactions and/or strategy consulting experience serving PE clients.
• Investor mindset and strong interest in Private Equity.
• Ability to work collaboratively in a team and create an inclusive environment with people at all levels of an organization.
• Capability to drive an independent workstream in the context of a broader team project.
• Comfort with ambiguous, ever-changing situations.
• Ability to break down and solve problems through quantitative thinking and analysis.
• Ability to communicate effectively, both verbally and in writing, in English.