Have you ever wondered about which apps you should install on your iPhone and iPad to make your life easier as a management consultant? Here is a selection of the most commonly used apps you should look out for to support your travels, productivity, networking and health.
1) Travel
- Airlines (e.g. Lufthansa, Delta, United): Download the airline apps of the most relevant airlines in your region. You will need these to review your bookings, check-in your flights and get flight updates. Keep in mind that most consulting firms have a travel agency that will take care of booking your flights and hotels.
- Taxi (e.g. Uber, Lyft, mytaxi): Download the most commonly used taxi apps in your area. Create a business account including your company address and add your most common addresses (e.g. home, work, airport) to the favorites.
- Train (e.g. DB Navigator in Germany): If you live in a country where taking the train is a common mode of transportation, download the app of your country’s train operators to check schedules and buy tickets.
- Car hire (e.g. Sixt): Clients don’t always have their offices in big cities – sometimes you will have to take a car from the airport to reach your client’s office. Most consulting firms have one preferred car hire company with negotiated corporate rates. Download the app and register with the company so all your data is already in the system when it’s time to book your first rental car.
- Car sharing (e.g. Drive Now, Car2Go): Car sharing is getting more and more popular in most cities around the world. Download the apps of the most popular car sharing services in your area, register for an account and make sure to also create a business account with your company address. Car sharing can be a great alternative if you are not able to get a taxi.
- Google Maps: The most popular maps app from Google is used by nearly every consultant. It’s great for getting directions to your client’s office and also for finding good dining options for team dinners in the evening.
- Flightradar24: Flying will most probably be your most common mode of transportation as a management consultant. Flightradar24 is a great app to track your flights and derive conclusions on possible delays. Since the official flight status is often updated very late and when you are already at the airport, flightradar24 gives you the option to track the inbound flight for your flight and make conclusions regarding the punctuality of your flight.
- Foodora / Deliveroo: Ordering lunch or dinner via one of the many popular food delivery service apps is a weekly routine for most management consultants. Download the apps of the most popular ones in your region and make sure to also register for a business account with your company’s address to make expensing the food easier.
- Currency Converter (e.g. XE Currency): As a management consultant, you will often find yourself on projects in foreign countries. A currency converter app will help you to get a feeling of the prices you pay.
- LoungeBuddy: A great tool for finding the best lounges based on your credit cards, status and loyalty programs. Just add all your details and the app will tell you the best lounges you have access to at all airports.
- TripIt: While most firms have a travel agency that will take care of booking your flights and hotels, you will most likely just get individual emails with all your bookings. Especially, if you book your travels several weeks in advance, keeping an overview of all your bookings can become quite tough. TripIt is a great solution many consultants use to easily resolve this issue. Just (automatically) forward all emails from your travel department to the TripIt email address and the app will create a transparent summary itinerary of all your bookings. This way you can easily check, which flights, hotels and other transportation you booked each week.
2) Productivity
- Asana: You will continuously organize your daily work in todo lists as a consultant and you want to track them in digital apps like Wunderlist or Asana. Both apps are the most popular ones amongst management consultants and also allow you to organize todo lists for your whole team. Therefore, almost every job manager uses one of these apps and will invite you to the todo lists of your workstream. Ideally, make sure to get familiar with both apps before you start your job as a management consultant.
- Trello: One of the most popular tools for project management. Even as a junior consultant you will quickly gain responsibility for certain project workstreams. Trello will help you to organize and manage these workstreams. Also, I like to use Trello when updating my job manager on the workstream’s progress.
- Slack: The most popular tool for collaborative working. Some project teams use Slack for a lot of their daily communication and interaction – make sure to get familiar with the app before you start your job as a management consultant.
- CamScanner: Often, clients will provide you with printed documents. Scanner apps like CamScanner are a great tool to digitize these documents and add them to the relevant folders on your computer.
- Evernote / Notability: Nowadays, many consultants take notes on their iPads. It’s a great way as you will always have your notes with you and modern apps like Evernote or Notability enable you to combine your hand written notes with other media like photos or PDF-documents.
- Microsoft Office: Download the Word, Excel and PowerPoint apps of Microsoft Office. Often, you will have to review documents on your iPhone and the apps will ensure you can open everything without formatting issues.
- Lucidchart: A great app to create beautiful diagrams on your iPad. Whenever I work on process-oriented tasks, I like to create process diagrams with Lucidchart and discuss and edit those together with project team and / or client right on my iPad.
- Grammarly: A popular tool that is easy to install on all of your devices and will support you in grammar and spell checks in all of your documents and emails.
3) Networking
- Linkedin: The most popular social network for professionals. If you don’t have an account yet, make sure to create one as soon as possible. You want to add and connect with all the colleagues and clients you meet during your time as a management consultant. It’s a great place to stay in contact, but also for receiving interesting job offers from head hunters and recruiters.
- Business Card Scanner (e.g. CamCard): Even in the 21st century, most professionals still exchange contact details via printed business cards. If you do not want to manually add all these infos to your digital contacts, business card scanner apps are a great tool to easily scan business cards and import them to your contacts.
4) Health
- Freeletics: One of my favorite apps to stay fit when traveling and with no access to a gym. The freeletics coach will guide you through high-intensity trainings that can be done in every hotel room.
- Calm / Headspace / Wim Hof: Most management consultants also use apps to help them meditate or relax during busy work weeks. Calm and Headspace are two popular apps for mediation. Another program that is getting increasingly popular among consultants is the Wim Hof method – it’s an interesting program that helps you to relax and increase your health, so make sure to download the free app.
