Consulting giant McKinsey & Co. not only has a reputation for rewarding its star employees with sky-high salaries—the organization is also a well-known stepping stone to the C-suite. Take a stroll through the office halls, and you’re sure to pass by a budding Fortune 500 CEO.
Just like Google’s Sundar Pichai and Doordash’s Tony Xu, Amit Walia, the CEO of $7.6 billion company Informatica, worked at McKinsey after receiving his MBA. And the experience—albiet daunting, and quite rigorous—set him up to thrive in his current role as chief executive.
“McKinsey was a dream job for me when I went to business school, partly because I was an engineer before business school,” Walia tells Fortune. “And I thought, ‘Look, what a great place to be to learn about business in the broadest way—and, of course, the most intense way.’”
Walia spent nearly five years at the consulting company as a senior engagement manager. He stepped into the role after a couple of stints in management and tech; right after receiving his undergraduate degree, the entrepreneur served as a senior officer for Indian manufacturer Tata Steel, overseeing 20,000 employees at just 22 years old.
Walia then spent two years as a senior engineer at $78 billion business Infosys Technologies before taking the leadership track. He attended Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, another training hotbed for top executives, and took the McKinsey job with an MBA in his back pocket. The experience primed him to step into Informatica’s top role in 2020, but it was no cake walk.
