Your journey
at Kéa
At Kéa, a consultant’s potential is expressed through three key dimensions:
We seek excellence analytical in the service of Responsible Transformation. Our consultants learn to be as comfortable with hard data as with emotional intelligence — to align strategic thinking with company culture, and to constantly innovate in their approach.
1
We encourage critical thinking and initiative. We expect our consultants to form strong convictions and voice them confidently. They are fully committed to our clients, understand their challenges, and push them to make bold, impactful decisions.
2
We cultivate a distinctive style rooted in our DNA: no arrogance, but empathy, humility, and strong ambition for our clients. Our consultants are recognized for their impact and their ability to engage in meaningful dialogue — with top executives as well as operational teams.
3
Five key stages shape your career at Kéa:
Life as
a Consultant
Your project assignments are managed by Staffing — a committee of Directors and Senior Partners responsible for your management and professional development. Staffing ensures a balance between applying the skills you have already acquired and learning new facets of our profession.
You will learn the consulting craft through hands-on project work and mentorship alongside more experienced consultants. This learning-by-example approach — alternating between comfort zones and stretch zones, tailored to your profile — will allow you to progress quickly, gain autonomy, and grow at your own pace. Each Project Manager will act as your “master mentor” for the duration of a project, and beyond if you wish.
Our training program, designed as a structured curriculum, supports each consultant throughout their journey in developing both technical and behavioral skills, enriched by the sharing of experiences and know-how from Project Managers and Partners.
Our approach
to consulting
Discover our consulting practice through three testimonials:
Stéphanie Nadjarian
Senior Partner & DG
CentraleSupélec
Helping leaders transform their companies is at the very heart of our work.
We created Kéa to practice strategy consulting in full independence — the way we believe it should be done — with strong ethics and a fresh perspective on business transformation.
Transformation is our specialty. We take on high-stakes, strategic challenges with a particular focus on the human factor — and that is where our uniqueness begins. It’s not just about rethinking strategy, structures, organization, processes, and systems. It’s also about deeply transforming professional behaviors across all levels of the company.
So, what is the added value of a Kéa consultant? What is their role?
They know how to combine strategy with culture, technical expertise with human insight, design with activation, and purpose with action. Day-to-day, they are present at the client’s side, close to the teams — understanding their history, culture, and ways of working. In co-creation, they work together to find the most relevant solutions and spark the energy that will ensure lasting success.
Thibaut Cournarie
Senior Partner
HEC
In March 2006, after a first experience as the director of a bank branch, I chose to join the consultants at Kéa, convinced by the rigor and quality of their methods, the sincerity of their convictions, and the uniqueness of their “style” — their way of being — which stood out from many of their peers.
It has now been 19 years, and I am still just as committed to the profession of strategy consulting as we practice it.
I value our conception of excellence and cultivate it with great pleasure.
We are confident in the value we bring as consultants, but in our day-to-day practice with clients, we make a conscious effort to remain discreet, avoiding the spotlight. We make sure to let our clients lead the way — we stay one step behind them: sometimes supportive, sometimes pushing, but never out in front as a flag bearer.
Our role is to help them imagine and formalize their own project — whatever it may be — and to create the right conditions to make it a reality on the ground. We don’t achieve this by imposing models or working in isolation, but by putting our expertise directly into the hands of decision-makers, working alongside them in the field.
We work with our clients in a co-creation spirit, and that is essential.
For us, excellence means putting as much intelligence and skill into the way a project is implemented as into its content.
In our view, there is no good strategy that only focuses on the target. Often, it is the way the path is taken — or the path itself — that prevents the goal from being reached. That is why, no matter how sharp our sector or functional expertise, we never start designing a project on paper without first thinking through, selecting, and beginning — together with our client — the journey that will lead to the objective.
Finally, knowing how to put our ambition at the service of our clients’ projects is also part of our vision of excellence.
We never take the facts of a problem for granted. Our openness, our collaborations with professionals outside consulting, our skills and our knowledge allow us to challenge the obvious, to show our clients a different perspective, and to push them to go beyond their initial objectives.
At Kéa, for a consultant, pursuing excellence in our profession starts with a great deal of personal discipline and a willingness to listen to those who have practiced it before us. It means accepting challenges to our thinking and questioning ourselves as often as possible. And it means being able to rejoice first in our client’s success — before taking satisfaction in our own work.
Bruno Taborin
Senior Partner
Mines ParisTech
When I ask students, during recruitment interviews or career forums, what interests and motivates them about strategy consulting, one phrase comes up time and again: “the school of excellence.”
Indeed, many of us choose this profession in pursuit of the Grail of professional excellence — a source of intellectual satisfaction and pride in belonging to a certain form of eminence.
But when I follow up with the question: “And what does excellence mean to you?”
…the answers become far less uniform.
Demand
Above all, I believe excellence is not a fixed state, but a continuous pursuit. Our methods and skills are constantly evolving to support our clients in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. I would therefore define excellence as a path — a constant, uncompromising demand to maximize the value we bring to our clients, and a willingness to learn from every experience how we might go even further in supporting them.
Exemplarity
More than most professions, consulting requires the individual to integrate into the team. Our clients choose an approach, an energy, a style — which can only exist when embodied collectively by everyone on the project, from the most junior to the most experienced.
To me, excellence should be the pursuit of a team’s perfection, built on exemplarity, solidarity, and mutual mentoring among all its members.
Inspiration
How can we define the boundaries of our profession, when our work can range from designing a company vision, to maximizing the performance of a sales team in a store, to redefining a marketing organization, or designing a new product or service offering?
To me, a commitment to excellence as a consultant necessarily involves being open to the outside world — seeking out skills we do not yet have, being curious about what we do not yet master, and finding inspiration in the many diverse interactions our profession offers.
Impact
In my view, excellence only exists through the perception of the client who commissioned our work. The excellence of a consultant should not be measured by the models they design or the organizational charts they produce, but rather by the impact they are able to generate for their client — their ability to create a positive, lasting dynamic that benefits the company and its people, fostering cohesion and pride.
Whatever your own vision of excellence may be, I believe it must be a source of energy and motivation to venture beyond the boundaries of familiar territory — and never a source of pressure or frustration. Striving for excellence in every single aspect is not only an extremely academic aspiration — it is, thankfully, an illusion. As Diderot wrote in Le Neveu de Rameau: “If everything here below were excellent, then nothing would be excellent.”
Our Positioning
What Sets Us Apart
Kéa is recognized in the Consultor ranking — the leading portal for strategy consulting — has achieved a score of 99/100 on the Gender Equality Index, and is certified HappyAtWork!
Kéa ranked 11th in the Consultor 2025 list of top strategy consulting firms!
For the 14th edition of the 2025 ranking, 635 final-year students* from eight leading French schools named the consulting firms they know best — and those they would most like to work for.
With a reputation score of 414, Kéa has climbed to 11th place in the ranking.
Our pride and our ambition: to maintain this prominent position among the top three 100% French-origin firms recognized and sought after by students! Being both the #1 French firm and the #1 “Entreprise à Mission” in the ranking truly sets us apart.
Now, it’s up to us to rise to the challenge and continue to be recognized as a reference for students who want to approach consulting differently!
Gender Equality Index
Our score: 99/100
For the fifth consecutive year, we have achieved an excellent performance (above 90 points) on the Gender Equality Index.
In 2025, our score of 99/100 places us at the very top of the Consultor gender parity ranking for the strategy consulting sector — and above the national average.
This momentum reflects our DNA, our daily mindset, and our distinctive approach to consulting, where both women and men are at the very heart of value creation. At Kéa, through the way we practice our profession, we strive to make female leadership an aspirational subject for all our people — transforming companies from the inside out.
LIRE PLUS
To achieve this, we focus on four key areas of action:
- Expanding the talent pool – Including women at the highest levels automatically brings access to additional skills, boosting productivity and improving recruitment quality.
- Making the company more resilient – Diverse profiles and working styles enhance decision-making, while the complementarity of male and female thinking fosters organizational stability.
- Sending a positive signal to the market – An inclusive and gender-balanced leadership is a sign of a healthy organization, reassuring stakeholders: investors, clients, partners, and future recruits.
- Motivating employees and building a more inclusive culture – Female leadership offers role models for other women in the company, making it easier for them to envision themselves in senior leadership roles.
FERMER
HAPPY AT WORK
Kéa certified HappyAtWork for starters 2023 !
- For the 7th year in a row, we have earned the HappyAtWork for Starters label — placing on the podium every time — with 100% of our Starters (under 29) included!
- As the first label recognizing companies where it’s great to start your career — in partnership with Les Echos-Start — HappyAtWork for Starters rewards excellence in management and the motivation of employees under 29.
- We achieved overall score of 4.47/5, recommendation rate of 86.5% (minimum threshold: 60%) , with a Participation rate of 75.5% (minimum threshold: 50%).
How do we meet our consultants’ expectations and deliver on our employer promise?
Each year, we analyze the results and comments from the HappyAtWork for Starters ranking to understand both explicit and underlying expectations — and to evolve our firm in a spirit of continuous improvement.
Professional Development
For us, the consulting profession is learned first and foremost on the job. Beyond more traditional in-person training, we focus on helping our consultants grow through mentorship, working alongside more experienced project managers. From the very start, client interaction is strong and responsibility comes quickly.
We also place our consultants in a state of dynamic imbalance — challenging them continuously, but in a structured way — to foster learning and ongoing development.
A Stimulating Environment
Mutual trust is a cornerstone of our culture, and from day one, we encourage our consultants to take initiative, speak their minds, and put forward their convictions — both internally and on projects.
We make a point of giving space for initiative-taking and creativity, enabling each consultant to lead projects that align with their own interests and strengths. For example, the Young Transformation Alliance was launched by junior consultants from across The Transformation Alliance firms, creating opportunities for exchange and collaboration within our international network.
LIRE PLUS
Innovation is also at the heart of Kéa’s strategy — whether in tackling core topics or rethinking the future of our profession.
Kéa also offers the chance to work every day within an interdisciplinary, international group, and to meet inspiring figures such as philosophers, artists, and business leaders. This is part of our commitment as an Entreprise à Mission: to empower every team member to be an entrepreneur in a changing world.
FERMER
Motivation and Management
Three key principles: Proximity, Fairness, Transparency
#1 Proximity – Beyond project-based supervision, we have established a close-contact management approach, with managers overseeing the development of no more than 15 consultants. This allows them to stay attuned to personal aspirations, guide each consultant’s professional growth, and design tailored career paths. Staffing is also carried out by management, taking into account continuous evaluations to best match assignments with each Kéiste’s development needs.
#2 Fairness – Our evaluation and compensation system is fair — no harsh “Up or Out” approach. It considers performance, exposure to new challenges, pace of development, and potential for growth.
#3 Transparency – Regular discussions are held on the firm’s strategy, results, and how each person can contribute. These include all-staff plenary sessions, team meetings, and grade-based discussion groups to address aspirations, ambitions, and any challenges faced.
Salary and Recognition
Beyond the transparency of our compensation system, our Partnership is a powerful mark of recognition. Through this unique and open Partnership — accessible as early as the Senior Consultant level, with 65% of our consultants as shareholders — we foster the transmission of knowledge to future generations and the strengthening of their commitment.
Pride
Kéa’s greatest asset is our consultants — their distinctive personalities and their passion for the profession. That’s why we make it a point to recognize and showcase them as they deserve:
- Internally, by celebrating major project successes
- Externally, as Kéa Ambassadors, for example when engaging with students
- From the Junior Consultant level, by contributing to commercial proposals, publications, Kéa conferences, or firm development initiatives
- With the opportunity, even for a junior, to organize an internal event on a topic they care about
Enjoyment
In strategy consulting, where high standards and excellence are the watchwords, we believe adding fun and kindness is far from incompatible!
It’s essential for us that Kéa remains an open and accessible firm — where even a junior can easily exchange with a Senior Partner, whether on a project or internally.
Every 4 to 6 weeks, we organize a half-day all-hands meeting, bringing the entire firm together to share updates on the business, celebrate successes, get inspired — and simply enjoy time together.
Our fantastic Animation Team, made up of consultants from all grades and support functions, also organizes afterworks and other highlights… always with a touch of irreverence!
