Women in the City Award Winner: Sara Caplan, Associate Partner, KPMG

by Elizabeth Harrin (London)

“I don’t think women find it harder to succeed than men,” says Sara Caplan. “I think often they choose a different lifestyle.” And management consultancy is a very specific lifestyle choice. It can involve long hours, being away from home, and being expected to hit the ground running as soon as you arrive at the client site. You can’t have an off-day and you can’t always predict how your working week will plan out. This can make it a difficult choice for women.

However, Sara Caplan is someone who has made a successful career out of management consultancy – and she has the certificate to prove it. She’s just won the Women in the City award for Management Consultancy at the awards luncheon that took place on November 28, 2008 in London. Sara is an Associate Partner at KPMG, the global professional services firm which provides audit, tax and advisory services which has 22 offices and 11,000 staff in the UK.

“I am a management consultant who does consultancy in areas relating to skills, people and change, focused mainly on the further education sector,” Sara explains. Before taking on this role, she spent ten years working in further education, so she has a deep insight into how the sector operates. She’s also a key player in her company’s Retaining Talented Women program.

“Within KPMG we really want to ensure that we nurture our talent,” she says. “We recognise that we are in a competitive marketplace and also that our work involves long hours and much travel and that this is not always family friendly. We also recognise that the number of women progressing at each level within the organisation reduces as one moves up the grades.”

In order to stop the leak of women away from management consultancy, KPMG put together a program of research, forums, events and training to gain feedback on why women might be tempted to leave and what barriers they see to progression. The aim is to find out how the company can help women to stay in their jobs and progress, through a programme to support talent. “The program has involved reviewing and changing many of our policies, introducing a wider flexibility in the way we work, holding training events for women, developing further mentoring programs and having annual retaining talented women conferences in which we feedback progress and talk about the issues that people have that we need to address,” Sara says. “We then plan our next iteration based on that feedback.”

She has compered the national conference for the last two years, so she has heard first-hand the stories of women working at KPMG and seen how the policy changes have had a positive impact on their work/life balance. “We continue to increase the flexibility in working hours and patterns, improve maternity policy and introduce further mentoring schemes,” she says. “These all help to support women. However there is no getting away from the fact that management consultancy does involve some travel and in order to meet client needs there are occasions on which we need to work long hours. Most of the time, if we manage things well, we can ensure that everyone’s family commitments are met. But sometimes that doesn’t work, so there is a level of unpredictability.”

Despite that, Sara would encourage people to take up the challenge of management consultancy. “It is an extremely rewarding job,” she says. “You have the opportunities to help organisations to improve, to apply your knowledge and skills to a very wide range of sectors and scenarios.”

If that sounds like something for you, Sara advises talking to someone who is already doing the job as a first step. “Most firms welcome speculative enquiries and would be happy to find you a consultant to talk to about the work,” she says. “You need to have stamina, commitment and love talking to people as well as obviously having excellent technical skills and abilities in your specialist area. It’s a great career and amazingly varied – you’re never bored!”