IT Consulting Companies 2026: Eight Codes, One Label

What IT consulting companies sell, and the two halves of it

IT consulting companies sell advice about technology and the labor that delivers it. The advice says what a client should build, buy or retire. The delivery writes the code, migrates the data, integrates the vendors and then often runs the result for years. Most large firms in this market bill for both. One of them publishes the ratio, and in Accenture's fiscal 2025 bookings the delivery half was the larger of the two.

That split is the single most useful thing to know before applying. Two firms with similar names can sit at opposite ends of it. One sends a small team to a client for ten weeks and leaves. The other staffs hundreds of people on a program that still has a payroll in four years. The work, the hours, the travel and the interview all follow from where a firm sits.

Accenture is the only firm in this market that publishes the split in audited numbers, and our page on what Accenture does reads it out of the filings line by line. The firms that publish nothing comparable are the majority. For them, the question has to be answered from the job posting and the practice page, which is what our page on tech consulting does for three of them.

The rest of this page does the part nobody does. It asks what the category itself means, and then it asks what the firms publish about their own interviews.

Eight SEC industry codes sit under one label

The clearest evidence that this category is several businesses is a number on a form. Every company that files with the Securities and Exchange Commission gets a Standard Industrial Classification code. The code appears in the EDGAR company record, and anyone can read it in one request. Nineteen US-listed firms that are routinely called IT consulting companies carry eight different codes.

Count the groups. Five filers sit under 7373, five under 7371, three under 8742, two under 7374, and one each under 3570, 7372, 7389 and 8741. That is 5 plus 5 plus 3 plus 2 plus 4, which is 19, across eight codes.

Three of the nineteen carry 8742, the code whose own description is management consulting services. IBM carries 3570, a hardware code. Gartner, whose stock ticker is the two letters IT, carries 8741.

What the code changes about an application, and what it does not

A SIC code is a box on a form. It describes how a filing is indexed, and a company's own self description can be wider than the box. So read the code as a signal and then go check the practice page, which our top IT consulting firms page does firm by firm.

Three things the code still tells you, and all three are cheap to check.

1. Where the company's center of gravity sits. A firm indexed under computer programming services or integrated systems design is indexed as a builder. A firm under 8742 is indexed as an advisor. That is the advice and delivery split, written by a third party who has no marketing reason to blur it.
2. Whether the code exists at all. McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Deloitte, Capgemini, Tata Consultancy Services and Slalom are not SEC filers, so they have no record here. Their absence is a fact about ownership, and it also means this test only works on the US-listed part of the market.
3. Which filing to open next. The EDGAR record names the filer, so the next click is the 10-K, where the revenue description and the competitor list live in the firm's own words.

The code is assigned to the filer and not to a subsidiary or a practice. Accenture Federal Services, Accenture Song and Accenture Strategy have no code of their own. So a candidate applying to a named practice inside a large group learns the group's indexing and nothing finer.

The technology interview adds a third thing to be read on

Here is the claim that justifies this page, and the firms write it themselves. A strategy interview reads two things: how you structure a problem and who you are. A technology interview at the firms that publish their process reads a third thing alongside those two.

BCG Platinion states it in one sentence on its application process page. "For client-facing positions, we'll also assess your problem-solving and analytical skills, as well as your IT skills, offering the necessary support and resources to help you prepare effectively for the interview." Problem solving, analytical skills and IT skills, in one list, for the same conversation.

The same page describes what the case study is supposed to surface: "Case study to show analytical, qualitative, technical and presentation skills." Four words, and two of them are technical and presentation.

McKinsey publishes one sentence on the same question, on its interviewing page. "If you're applying for a technical role, you'll undergo an assessment tailored to evaluate your specific technical skills. This may include coding challenges, problem-solving tasks, or other role-specific exercises designed to assess your proficiency in the technical areas most relevant to the position." Read the verb. The assessment is added to the sequence. Nothing on that page says a technical candidate skips the business case, which is the practical consequence for anyone preparing. Our QuantumBlack interview page works through what that means for McKinsey's analytics arm.

BCG Platinion runs a business case and an IT case in one round

The sharpest published evidence of the difference is a round structure. BCG Platinion's application process page lays out several variants side by side, and one of them titles round two "2 separate interviews (BCG business case and BCG Platinion IT case)." Its content rows name both: "IT case study similar than round 1" and "Business case study," with "One interview with BCG Platinion Director, one with BCG leadership team member."

A candidate who meets that variant is examined twice on different material in the same round. One conversation is a commercial problem. The other is a systems problem. The firm also publishes that the process runs to "a minimum two rounds of interviews, including case studies," that "Additional interviews may be required, depending on specific cases," and that "Decisions and Round 2 are often combined."

Two more published details are worth copying into a checklist. One variant requires "Logic test completion within 1 week before interviews," so the test has a deadline relative to the interviews rather than to the application. And the application bundle differs from a strategy bundle: "Apply by sending your CV including a list of projects, and, if available, references and transcripts."

The preparation page repeats the project list and makes it a requirement. "If you are applying for a consulting team position, you need to also include your project list, listing relevant consulting projects or cases within your CV or as an additional file." The same page offers an IT Architecture quiz as practice material, hosted away from the firm's own domain. Our BCG Platinion interview page carries the full round table and a worked build against buy case.

IBM attaches the coding test to the role you applied to

IBM publishes its steps as Application, Screening, Online Assessment, Interview and Decision. The assessment step is where technology hiring shows itself, and the firm hedges the count: "We might ask you to complete one or two assessments, which can vary depending on your role."

Three assessments are named on that page as of 8 October 2026. The coding one is the one that matters here, and its scope is written into the sentence. "Complete a set of multiple-choice questions or coding challenges depending on the role you applied to in order to help us understand your level of programming knowledge and ability." The other two are a video assessment, where you "Answer a series of interview questions using your webcam and microphone," and an English language assessment of "multiple-choice questions in a text-based format."

So the coding test is attached to the role rather than to the company. That is the single most common misreading of technology consulting recruiting, and the firm's own wording settles it. The interview step then branches: you "may be invited to schedule an interview (phone, video or in person) or an assessment center visit (group exercise and in-person interview)."

One caution about everything above. The page closes with "Please note hiring process may vary by location and region," and our fuller IBM Consulting guide reports a four assessment list and a completion clock that this reading did not find. Treat the role-specific wording as the durable part and check the live page for the rest.

What IT consulting companies never publish about the work

Four questions on this subject have no answer in any company document we read, and naming them is more useful than guessing at them.

1. The advice and delivery split, for almost everybody. One firm in this market publishes it in audited numbers. For the other eighteen filers in the table, no segment note separates advice from the labor that follows it, so the ratio has to be inferred from job postings.
2. What the technical exercise contains. McKinsey writes "may include." BCG Platinion names a logic test with no vendor, no length and no question count. No firm we read publishes a sample of its own technical screen.
3. Which published variant applies to you. BCG Platinion prints several round structures in parallel columns and never says which one a given candidate meets. That is a question for the recruiter, and it is a fair one to ask.
4. Pay. No firm in this market publishes a salary band for a technology consulting role. Our Accenture salary page works from certified US Labor Department filings instead, and our consulting salary guide sets those against other firms. The federal occupational wage tables would be the neutral source here, and bls.gov served a robot block on both relevant pages on 8 October 2026, with the archive offline the same day.

One more absence is worth stating plainly, because this page refuses to fill it. There is no ranking of these firms here and there will not be. A ranking would require a measure none of them publishes, and the eight vendor lists on this query each use a different one.

Drilling the structure an IT case is marked on

The part of a technology case that transfers from strategy preparation is the structure. A systems problem still has a decision at the top, a small number of branches that do not overlap, and arithmetic that has to land. The part that does not transfer is the material: sequencing, feasibility and migration risk carry real weight when the answer has to exist afterward.

The free structure drill grades the first part. It reads whether a structure covers the decision rather than whether it looks tidy, which is the failure mode when a candidate reaches for a generic framework on a technical prompt. The weights are ours and no firm publishes any. They live in our code and on the method page as Coverage 45, Separation 25, Depth 20, Concision 10.

What the drill does not do is test technical knowledge. It will not ask you about release pipelines, data models or vendor lock-in, and it does not simulate a coding challenge or a logic test. Our assessments page says how many of our six simulators are live, on the page itself. For the technical half, the firms' own material is the better route: the published case instructions on the Platinion preparation page, and the architecture quiz it points at. Both are free, and reading them takes an afternoon.

If you want the firm-by-firm version of this page, the practice names and application doors are on top IT consulting firms, and the category boundaries across the whole industry are on types of consulting firms. Two questions this page leaves open have a home as well. What the day-to-day work consists of, and what the two recruiting architectures do to an application, are on tech consulting. What a technology case is actually built on, with the arithmetic worked, is on the three firm pages linked above.