Leland+ Content Library

Telling Your Story - Your Guide to Making a Career Pivot

Exercise Self Paced Guide: This guide helps you do the inner work behind a career pivot; understanding your experiences, identifying what you want next, and building clarity around your direction so you can move forward with confidence.

Experienced Resume Template | Landed Roles at F500 Companies

My most commonly used 2-page resume template for professionals with a wide range of experience. Includes a polished PDF example of a strong resume plus an editable Word version with detailed comments explaining structure, formatting, and content decisions. This resume template is flexible and can be a 1-page resume depending on client goals/preference.

Case Walkthrough with a Former Bain Interviewer: Mergers and Acquisitions

M&A cases are a core part of consulting interviews, but many candidates struggle to structure them clearly and communicate their thinking under pressure. This session is for candidates preparing for consulting interviews who want a better approach to tackling mergers and acquisitions cases. You’ll learn how to break down an M&A prompt, structure your analysis across synergies and risks, and walk through a case the way interviewers expect to see it.

How to Make Your PM Resume Impossible to Ignore

After this session, you'll know how to position your PM resume so it reflects the way hiring managers actually evaluate candidates. We'll cover how to frame impact metrics that go beyond output, how to signal product thinking through your bullet structure, and how to cut the experience that's quietly working against you.

Final Tips Before You Submit Your Deferred MBA Application

In this session, you will leave knowing how to tighten your essays in the final hours, what admissions committees at top deferred programs actually look for in the "future vision" prompts, and how to self-evaluate your recommender package before you hit submit. These are the specific pressure points that separate competitive deferred applications from strong ones.

Crafting Powerful Narratives for MBA Applications

Many MBA applicants have strong experiences but struggle to turn them into a clear, compelling story that resonates with admissions committees. This session is designed for candidates who want to understand how to connect their past experiences, leadership moments, and career goals into a cohesive narrative that strengthens every part of the application. You’ll learn how successful applicants frame their impact, choose the right stories for essays and interviews, and communicate a believable path from where they are today to where they want to go.

Build Your Master’s Application Narrative

Many strong applicants struggle to clearly explain why their experiences, goals, and chosen program fit together into a compelling master’s application. This session is designed for candidates preparing graduate school applications who want to turn scattered achievements into a focused, persuasive narrative. You’ll learn how to connect your academic background to future goals, identify the experiences that matter most to admissions committees, and structure essays that present a clear story about who you are and where you’re headed.

Big 10 to MBB + Big Tech: Positioning Yourself to Get Offers

This guide was written by a former Bain & Company Associate Consultant, now in a Strategy and Operations role at LinkedIn, who went through the full MBB recruiting process out of Indiana University's Kelley School of Business. It covers everything that actually matters when you are trying to break into a top consulting firm or land a Big Tech strategy role from a non-target school. Inside you will find a no-nonsense breakdown of how MBB firms actually differ, what a competitive application looks like, how to build a resume that passes the ten-second scan, and the networking approach that moves the needle versus the one that wastes your time. The guide goes deep on case interview preparation, including the pyramid framework approach and what interviewers are genuinely evaluating in the room, and covers the behavioral and fit interview with the same level of honesty. The final chapter covers what transfers from consulting to Big Tech, how that recruiting process works, and how to negotiate an offer once you have one. This is not generic advice. It is based on having gone through the process recently, having sat on the other side of the table at Bain, and having made the transition to Big Tech firsthand.

Medical School Personal Statement Example - T5 Admit

This is my medical school personal statement, which helped me get accepted to UPenn, Northwestern, Duke, and Vanderbilt with merit scholarships.

8 Steps to an MBA app: 1) Life Story, Timeline, & MBA Resume

Applying to business school can feel overwhelming! You have dozens of moving pieces: essays, short answers, video content, resume, recommendations, outreach, research, and more. This workshop is the starting point of a structured 8-part MBA Identity Mapping series designed to take you from fragmented tasks to a clear plan of action. In this session, you will build your foundational Life Timeline of all your key stories and begin transforming your resume into MBA format. These sessions walk you step by step through building one fully aligned MBA application. In every workshop, you will be assigned tasks to complete over the next two weeks, keeping you organized and accountable. By the end, you will have strong, authentic essays and a cohesive narrative that runs consistently through your resume, goals, recommendations, school strategy, and interviews. You are absolutely welcome to attend individual sessions if you only need focused help on a specific component(s) of your MBA application. Event 1 identifies your significant experiences and reshapes your resume into MBA format: • Understand the full trajectory of the 8-phase MBA Identity Mapping process and how each piece connects. • Build a comprehensive Life Timeline that captures the raw material of your life. • Begin transforming your professional resume into MBA format. The MBA Identity Mapping process has guided 100+ applicants into every M7 program, all other top 20 U.S. programs, and leading international programs including INSEAD, London Business School, IESE, Esade, Oxford, Cambridge, NUS, and more. Clients consistently describe it as transformative because it replaces scattered effort with forward momentum and strategic clarity. If you are ready to stop juggling tasks and start building an organized, cohesive MBA application, this is where you begin. (Please message me if you would like a copy of the super helpful free resource mentioned in the video: MBA Resume Transformation Guide.)

How to Run an Efficient Small Business Search

Buying a small business sounds simple until you actually start searching. Suddenly you are juggling deal flow, broker calls, industry research, financial review, diligence, and legal concepts. All while trying to keep your life and job moving. This session is for the person who is ramping into acquisition entrepreneurship and wants real guidance, not a generic accelerator curriculum and not “just ask ChatGPT.” If you are smart, motivated, and serious about buying a business but feel overwhelmed by the volume of decisions and the lack of a clear path, this will click. We will walk through what an efficient search actually looks like in the real world: the phases of search, where people waste time, what progress looks like, and what it realistically takes to get competent. Spoiler: 5 hours a week is usually not enough. Most people underestimate the reps required (think hundreds of hours, not a weekend), and the main goal is to compress the learning curve by focusing on the highest-leverage work. What you will leave with: - A clear picture of the search process end-to-end and what “good” looks like at each stage - The real time commitment and why most searches stall - Practical ways to run search faster and cleaner (systems, workflows, decision filters) - A map of the core skill areas you need to build: deal sourcing, industry analysis, financial fluency, diligence, and negotiation A simple decision framework for your next step: learn it, hire it out, or partner Who this is for: - You want to buy a small business, but you do not want to wander for 12 months figuring it out the hard way - You want more hands-on support than an accelerator, and more signal than generic online content - You are ready to put in the work, but you want a more efficient path and fewer dead ends We will also share a bit of our own search context - what we have tried, what has worked, what has not - and why we believe 1:1 support can meaningfully cut down ramp time when you apply it correctly. If you have been circling ETA and keep thinking “this is a lot,” you are not wrong. Come get a sharper path.

How to Craft a Standout Resume for Investment Banking

After this session, you will know how to structure an investment banking resume that clears the initial screen and holds the attention of a recruiter who reviews hundreds in a single cycle. The coach will cover how to quantify deal exposure and financial skills without overstating your experience, how to tailor your bullets for bulge bracket versus boutique targets, and how to position non-traditional backgrounds so they read as assets rather than gaps.

AI Tools You Need to Know for Product Management

This session takes a practical, hands-on approach to AI tools for Product Managers. Rather than a generic tool roundup, attendees will see how AI fits into the actual PM workflow: from discovery and research to documentation, stakeholder communication, and process automation. Every example comes from real client projects and production workflows.

Nail the McKinsey Personal Experience Interview

The McKinsey Personal Experience Interview is one of the most distinctive and challenging parts of the consulting process, and many candidates underestimate how different it is from standard behavioral interviews. This session is for candidates preparing for McKinsey who want to approach the PEI with more structure and confidence. You’ll learn how to select and refine your stories, demonstrate leadership and impact with specificity, and communicate your experiences in a way that aligns with what McKinsey evaluates.

MBA Essays That Get You Admitted: Do’s and Don’ts from an M7 Expert

MBA essays are where strong candidates separate themselves, but many applicants struggle to turn their experiences into a clear and compelling story. This session is for MBA applicants who want to approach their essays with more strategy and confidence. You’ll learn what makes an essay memorable to admissions readers, common mistakes that weaken otherwise strong profiles, and how to structure your story so it aligns with what top programs are looking for.

How to Stand Out in the Schwarzman Scholars Application

After this session, you will know how to position your leadership narrative for the Schwarzman Scholars rubric, structure your essays to reflect the program's focus on global impact and cross-cultural collaboration, and avoid the framing mistakes that consistently weaken otherwise strong applications. These are patterns that surface repeatedly when reviewing what separates admitted candidates from those who fall short.

The Ideal Dental School Application Timeline

Applying to dental school requires careful planning, but many applicants aren’t sure when each piece of the process should actually happen. This session is for prospective dental students who want a clear, realistic timeline for building and submitting a competitive application. You’ll learn when to prepare for the DAT, how to sequence shadowing and extracurriculars, and how to plan essays, recommendations, and submissions so nothing important gets rushed.

How to Strengthen Your Deferred MBA Story Before the Deadline

Deferred MBA programs look for candidates with clear potential, thoughtful career vision, and evidence of leadership early in their careers. If you’re planning to apply this cycle, the months before the deadline are when strong applicants refine their goals, sharpen their narrative, and ensure their experiences clearly support why an MBA makes sense for them. In this session, you’ll learn how to clarify your long-term story, highlight leadership and impact effectively, and strengthen the core themes that run through your essays and application materials.

Frameworking Mindset Shifts: How to Solve Any Case Prompt

After this session, you will have a repeatable mental framework for approaching any case prompt, regardless of industry or format. We will cover how to identify the core question beneath a prompt, how to structure your thinking before you speak, and how to shift your mindset from solving to synthesizing the way strong candidates consistently do.

Home for Ambition #3 — Weekly Live Show [4/1/2026] (Recording)

Home for Ambition is a weekly live show, by Leland, for people trying to stay ahead as work, learning, and opportunity keep changing. Each episode tackles a handful of timely, high-signal topics across AI, careers, education, and the future of work. We expect thoughtful debate, unique perspectives, and practical takeaways you can actually use. It is not a typical interview show or a generic news recap. It is a live roundtable built to help ambitious people make sense of what is changing, understand what matters, and leave with a sharper point of view on how to navigate what comes next.