An Ex-McKinsey Manager’s Playbook: How to Job-Hop Precisely and 4x Your Salary
Augustine's StoryHow to use job changes as leverage in your career.
When I first graduated, I was an unremarkable graduate of a French business school. My French wasn’t good, so my first job search was especially painful — consulting, investment banking, and other high-paying jobs were all out of reach. Eventually, after much effort, I joined a French multinational industrial group as a strategy and M&A management trainee, on a salary of €40k a year — pretty average.
I remember a classmate who went to work at a bank asking me, “On that little salary every month, how could you possibly save any money?” I also remember that, because my husband joined MBB straight out of school, in the rather status-conscious HEC Paris circle I was “the wife of someone at MBB” — many people only saw him, not me. And I remember that after fees and taxes, I took home just over two thousand euros a month; thinking about the near-negligible annual raises and a promotion that felt impossibly far off, I felt pretty down.
Eight years later, everything had changed. Across four jobs and three moves, I quadrupled my salary. I became the only Chinese woman manager on the PE track at MBB’s Paris office, and before turning 35, the youngest Director at a listed multinational. I’m not exceptionally gifted, nor a born workaholic. I simply learned to seize the right moments and use job changes precisely to overtake on the bends. If the unremarkable me of back then could get here, I’m confident you can do even better.
Lesson 1: In your first decade, change jobs boldly to build your “experience capital”
The book The Long Game cites research showing that most people earn 85–90% of their wealth after age 40. And according to a McKinsey study, what really drives the gap in pay and wealth accumulation isn’t your degree — it’s so-called “experience capital,” especially the kind built handling major projects, solving thorny problems, and owning front-line business. That experience capital is often the foundation for making it to the executive ranks or succeeding as a founder.
But in a typical large company, work is finely divided and progress is slow, especially at the junior level. After two or three years, the learning curve usually flattens, and manager-and-above roles tend to favor people parachuted in from outside.
My first job was as an in-house M&A analyst. The key to M&A is accumulating deal experience — but in my second year, there were no deals at all for more than half a year. My days were spent on internal reporting; the team’s managers sometimes went home at 3 p.m. It looked comfortable, but it was quietly dangerous. I felt I was wasting my life, and I started thinking about leaving.
Soon after, I got an opportunity: the raise was pitiful and the company wasn’t famous, but it was in an aggressive “buy, buy, buy” expansion phase, and it let me deeply participate in and lead large M&A deals worth over a hundred million euros, end to end. So without overthinking it, I made the jump. Over the next three-plus years I truly was “earning cabbage money while worrying like a drug dealer,” but I did build up rich experience capital there — and that capital became the very foundation for my second and third moves and the leaps that followed.
Augustine’s takeaway
If you want height and comfort in your second and third career decades, don’t chase comfort in your first. Seek out as many chances as possible to build experience capital — major projects tied to company strategy or operations, complex problems, multi-party collaboration, work that demands constant analysis and thinking. And when a place can no longer offer dense opportunities to accumulate that capital, be decisive about leaving for the next platform. Roles that deliver both a salary jump and a seniority jump are ideal, but if you can’t find one, prioritize big capability gains early on — in your first or second job — even if it means a slight salary sacrifice. The experience capital you build early pays rich dividends over the longer mid-and-late stages of your career.
Lesson 2: Switching between industry and consulting amplifies your job-change leverage
Many people treat a job change purely as a “salary springboard.” But its real value lies in switching role and perspective — closing the loop on your capabilities and building stronger competitive moats.
After five years of in-house M&A experience, the pandemic hit. The company’s investment budget shrank sharply, and once again I went more than half a year with no deals to work on. This time, I thought about moving to MBB. The reasoning was simple: I wanted to experience working on the advisory side, even if it would be exhausting, intense, and hard for a non-native French speaker. I chose strategy consulting because I knew that to one day reach a company’s core decision-making circle, I needed to level up my communication, my ability to manage C-level and stakeholders, my problem-solving on complex, fast-changing issues, and my fluency operating across Chinese, English, and French.
MBB would act as a fast lane and a lever for my career. After a bit more than three months of preparation, I landed a senior consultant offer at MBB — already doubling my salary. Three-plus years later, when I left MBB, my earlier in-house experience plus the MBB “gold plating” made me stand out among competitors who had only pure advisory backgrounds. I received several VP/Director offers and chose the one that fit best on every dimension — once again making a career leap through a job change.
Augustine’s takeaway
If, like me, you’ve spent years in industry and mastered the execution details but still lack higher-level strategic thinking and communication, consider moving to the advisory side — especially top-tier consulting. It quickly broadens your industry perspective, rewires how you think and work, and gives you higher-quality networks. If you start on the advisory side and plan to return to industry in a management role later, time your “return” carefully: at consulting manager level and above, suitable openings shrink, and the longer you stay in advisory, the harder it becomes to land back in industry. Switching between industry and consulting at the right moment amplifies your leverage, because it helps you build a capability model from different perspectives — evolving from “executor” to “advisor” to “decision-maker.” That kind of capability, experience, and courage to leave your comfort zone is a scarce resource anywhere.
Lesson 3: Plan each job change as a strategic upgrade
My first move took me from analyst to manager, and from small deals to billion-euro scale. I knew it was a qualitative leap, even at the temporary cost of salary growth. My second move, from industry to MBB, was also a change I knew would help my career enormously.
Augustine’s takeaway
A truly effective job change should be a proactively planned strategic upgrade. Before you start looking for your next role, think carefully about a few questions:
- In my current job, have I gotten everything I wanted? Have I used this opportunity to add as much value to myself as possible? Does this job still have anything else to offer me? If the first two answers are yes and the last is no, then a move may be a good choice.
- What skills or resources do I want to gain from my next move? For example, exposure to higher-level decisions, leading a team, or moving into more core business. Salary matters, but it isn’t everything — especially in your first decade.
- What is my market value right now? Is the market paying a premium for my skills? Even if you’re not planning to leave, stay in touch with headhunters, keep a pulse on the market, and adjust your strategy. If your industry is shrinking, switch to a rising track early.
- At my next move after this one, will this work experience make me more valuable? Don’t judge a job only by its current returns — weigh at least its impact over the next 3–5 years.
There are also some unwritten rules. Don’t hop too frequently — changing every 3–5 years is fairly safe. In your first decade, experiment more and build breadth to maximize experience-capital accumulation; in your second decade, the focus shifts toward stability and vertical depth, and the interval between moves may stretch longer.
My three moves — from junior on the industry side, to advisory, and back to industry in a senior role — each meant re-evaluating my own value and redesigning my experience and capability model, pushing myself to a higher version in a relatively short time. Of course, alongside the corresponding pay premium, I also took on risk for each transformation.
If a job can no longer meet your current needs, leaving decisively is a way of taking responsibility for yourself. Changing jobs and job-hunting are a hassle but not scary; what’s scary is spinning in place, draining yourself without taking action — especially in your first decade, the capital-building phase, when your precious time and energy should be spent where they create the most value.
In upcoming articles, we’ll keep sharing how to find the next role you really want, how to raise your success rate in interviews at every level, and how to use your network to unlock exclusive opportunities. Stay tuned.