AN EMPIRICAL STUDY OF CONSULTING IN A TRANSITIONAL ECONOMY IN THE CENTRAL EUROPEAN REGION DURING COVID-19

The consulting industry has been affected in many ways by the global pandemic. According to a leading international literature source (consultancy.org), the decline is most noticeable in Europe. In our article, we present the general recent trends of the global management consulting industry, and then outline the results of our survey conducted among Hungarian consultants. Our team surveyed the extent and direction in which consulting companies have been affected by the pandemic. Although some of the respondents reported rather negative effects, the survey finds that a significant proportion of respondents consider the emerging crisis as an opportunity and not only as a threat.

Consulting during the coronavirus in the light of an empirical survey in Hungary

Relatively little accurate information about management consulting and its market is available to interested readers. Therefore, in this article, we are committed to presenting the most important global trends from various sources, analyzing the main features of the development of the European, Central and Eastern European, as well as the Hungarian consulting markets. Among several other industries, the consulting sector has been affected negatively by the emergence of corona crisis. Consulting, characterized by stable growth and expansion before the pandemic, is estimated to have declined by 17-18 percent in 2020. However, different experts agree that consulting industry will recover faster from the current crisis than before. The pandemic has caused radical changes in the way we work and communicate, and consultants are ready to keep with the flow. One of the key questions of our empirical study in Hungary was the extent to which each consulting organization experienced an economically negative situation, the areas where there was a decrease or an increase, and the extent to which they see new opportunities for the future. Based on the results obtained, we found that the examined organizations were negatively affected by the crisis in terms of sales and services, but a significant part of the organizations also see new opportunities in the current situation for the future.