Associate Consultant, Launch Graduate Program – 2027, Johannesburg, South Africa

In brief

**Overview** This is an 18-month Associate Consultant role within Mastercard's Launch Graduate Program for 2027, based in Johannesburg, South Africa. The program aims to build specialized expertise through hands-on experience, structured learning, and mentorship. Participants will work on real business challenges to create meaningful impact, deepen their knowledge of Mastercard's business, collaborate with teams across the organization, and develop the necessary technical, analytical, and professional capabilities for career acceleration. By the program's conclusion, individuals will have a strong foundation in their chosen field and confidence for continued growth at Mastercard. **What you will do** As an Associate Consultant, you will collaborate within small teams to help global brands answer and implement solutions for their most challenging strategic questions. You will make meaningful contributions by taking ownership of deliverables and building external relationships with clients. Focusing on technology and data, you will gain broad exposure to various industries, including financial services, retail, restaurants, and hospitality. The program offers two specialization tracks: * **Strategy & Transformation:** Guide clients through strategic, tactical, operational, and transformational challenges to enhance performance and operations. Engagements cover diverse areas such as product development, marketing, customer loyalty, and innovation, often interfacing directly with Fortune 500 companies. Team members typically support 1-3 projects concurrently, with each project lasting approximately 8-16 weeks. * **Marketing:** Develop strategies and lead the implementation of marketing campaigns and engagements, evaluating results to drive performance for Mastercard’s clients. You will provide deep direct marketing expertise across channels, leveraging customer, behavioral, and transactional data, and defining tangible results for both the client and Mastercard. Team members typically support 1-3 projects from any domain and build fundamental marketing and consulting toolkit. **Requirements (from the original advert)** * Undergraduate or master’s degree with an expected graduation date in November 2026 – August 2027. * Ability to communicate complex ideas effectively – both verbally and in writing – in English. * Availability: Must be available to start in March or September 2027. * **Core competencies:** * **Passion:** Actively seeks responsibility and takes pride in delivering the highest quality results and recommendations to clients. Proven record of leadership in a work setting and/or through extracurricular activities. * **Analytic Excellence:** Demonstrates a strong aptitude for structured problem-solving, analytical, and quantitative skills. Experience using data analysis or querying tools e.g., SQL, SAS, Excel or Tableau is an asset particularly for Performance Analytics or Business Experimentation tracks. * **Business Interest:** Clear interest in the world of business, and intuition for the way that companies make decisions. * **Rapid Growth:** Eagerness to learn quickly, both through Mastercard's structured training curriculum and organic development opportunities. * **Teamwork:** Willingness to work within small teams to produce outstanding deliverables, with a will to win attitude. * **Integrity:** Outstanding record of academic achievement. Commitment to Mastercard's values of honesty and integrity with a willingness to embrace and learn from mistakes. * **Diverse Perspective:** Brings a unique skillset or approach to the table in every client engagement or internal activity. * **Communication:** Ability to communicate complex ideas effectively. Excellent written and verbal communication skills. **Who should apply** This program is for passionate and talented professionals who share Mastercard's vision for helping customers with their most urgent business needs. Ideal candidates are those seeking to build specialized expertise through hands-on experience, structured learning, and mentorship, and are keen to work on real business challenges to create meaningful impact. Applicants should be interested in deepening their knowledge of Mastercard's business, collaborating across teams, and developing technical, analytical, and professional capabilities to accelerate their career. Candidates must also demonstrate strong problem-solving abilities, analytical and quantitative skills, a clear interest in business, eagerness for rapid growth, a collaborative team-player mindset, and high integrity. Applicants should indicate their first track preference (Strategy & Transformation or Marketing) in their CV. **Deadline** 5th November **Reference** Original posting: https://www.myjobmag.co.za/job/associate-consultant-launch-graduate-program-2027-johannesburg-south-africa-mastercard Source: myjobmag

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At a glance

• SQL
• Tableau
• Microsoft Excel

Extracted automatically from the advert; confirm requirements on the original listing.

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