The one key skill for ambitious people looking to move forward in their lives

When I was doing interviews with new graduates and experienced hires for management consultant positions, we used to have something called ‘the airport test’.

The airport test is simply — if you were stuck with the person that you were interviewing at the airport, how long would you want to spend stuck at the airport with them? (In this case, the longer the better). If you could talk to that person about a wide variety of subjects, and there was a lot of back and forth, this person would pass the airport test. The reasoning is that if they can talk to someone else like a normal human being, they would also be able to talk to clients. And a lot of what management consultants do is communicate with clients, set expectations, take them out for social events, build relationships and much more.

I’m sure that it has been talked about enough that everybody knows what the airport test is, but even knowing that a test like that exists does not mean that you can pass it easily — a lot of it depends on what you know, what you are interested in and how well you can communicate what you know into something interesting for the other person. Just because you are interested in snails from Australia does not mean that someone else has that same interest.