Deetken team members come from a variety of backgrounds and sometimes the roads to Deetken aren’t direct, but one thing all our team members have in common is curiosity…

Check out our latest Meet the Team interview with Deetken Senior Associate Zack Young as he talks about his own road to Deetken, what he most enjoys about his work and why he thinks curiosity is one of the most important skills for a career in management consulting.

Tell us about your background. What brought you to Deetken Insight?

I’m originally from Windsor, Ontario. I moved to Toronto to do my undergraduate degree at University of Toronto, then I moved to Vancouver to complete my master’s degree at Simon Fraser University (SFU). Both my degrees are in Economics, and I also completed an undergraduate minor in Statistics and Mathematics.

I first learned about Deetken at an SFU recruitment event. I originally wanted to do a co-op at Deetken, but I had already accepted a co-op position with the Federal government. I interviewed with Deetken anyway and although it didn’t lead to anything right away, I kept in touch with [Deetken Partner] Samir [Shah] as I finished my master’s. When I graduated, Samir reached out to me, and soon enough I was working at Deetken.

I think a major thing that attracted me to Deetken was that personal touch throughout the recruitment process. I really felt that they wanted what was best for me, and I hadn’t felt that in any of my other interviews. I also was really excited about the team and level of expertise at Deetken. Everyone I met was brilliant and enthusiastic, and it just seemed like a great place to work.

You just celebrated your 3-year anniversary in January. What do you feel has been your biggest accomplishment over the past 3 years or what do you enjoy most about your work? 

The thing I enjoy most about my work is the scope and impact of the projects that I get to work on. I’ve had the opportunity to work on some large-scale projects that have the possibility to really impact a lot of people. And the breadth of the projects I’ve had a chance to work on is remarkable as well – from healthcare to utilities, economic impact studies to deal negotiations, I’ve been able to work on a lot of complex problems.

One of the benefits of working on such a broad spectrum of complex projects is that I am constantly learning. Every project presents a different challenge and, by working through that challenge, I build up my knowledge base and refine my skills. That’s really exciting for me, and I am constantly looking forward to what I’m going to learn about next.

My biggest accomplishment at Deetken has been a report we wrote for a provincial health ministry on rural and remote physician compensation. Sometimes our projects have a narrow scope and are focused on a single problem, but for this review we had much freer rein than usual and access to a lot of data. Our final report was over 200 pages long and very comprehensive. The depth and breadth of that report was a big accomplishment for me and was the synthesis of a lot of my expertise in both quantitative and qualitative analysis.

What skills do you think are most useful for a career in consulting?

I think the most important talent as a consultant is to be curious. Whether it’s looking at data to pull out insights, reviewing some program or business case, or supporting a negotiation, the value we deliver to our clients is so often driven by curiosity and a strong desire to find a solution. Most skills can be learned in a relatively short time frame, but I curiosity is what really sets someone apart.

Often times that curiosity will drive you to learn new skills. Recently, I was reviewing a physician incentive model in Alberta, and I became interested to see how that incentive was geographically distributed. So, I did some reading and learned how to use GIS software to map those incentives. That new GIS skill was helpful in that project but is also something I’ve used in other projects since.

What do you like to do for fun?

I love to cook, and I love to go out to new restaurants. I really like managing big projects in the kitchen, whether it’s hosting a dinner party for 12 people or doing some pickling or fermenting over the course of a week. I also love to travel and be on the water. I take a trip to Newfoundland every summer, and love being out by the ocean and eating seafood.

Are you curious? Learn how you can fulfill your curiosity at Deetken; visit our Careers page now.