Kearney used to be called A.T. Kearney. It dropped the initials in 2020, so if you've been searching for "A.T. Kearney graduate scheme", it's the same firm. It's one of the older strategy consultancies, founded in Chicago in 1926, and it sits in the tier just below MBB.
What Kearney is known for
Kearney has a long-standing reputation in operations: procurement, supply chain and cost work, alongside strategy. That's useful to know for two reasons:
- It tells you what kind of problems you'd work on. Operations work tends to be very concrete: where is the money going, and how do we spend less of it?
- It tells you which experiences to put first on your CV. Anything where you improved how something ran, saved money or time, or untangled a process is directly relevant.
A Kearney-shaped bullet
Before: Helped the operations team with various projects
After: Mapped the ordering process for a 12-site restaurant group and cut weekly food waste by 18% by moving two suppliers to daily delivery
Even a part-time job can produce a bullet like this if you were paying attention.
The rest of the CV
The usual consulting screen applies: leadership with scale, problems you solved, and drive. Kearney is also a global firm with offices across Europe, the Middle East and Asia, so languages and international experience earn their place on the page.