Switching from consulting/agency to big tech/product?

If anyone here has done this and has advice, I’d love to hear. I hear a lot about how it’s more difficult to do so, but I really think that I want out of consulting/agency design work. I’m a product designer at a consultancy right now. What kinds of things should I focus on for portfolio presentations? For those who have interviewed candidates, what do you find different/challenging about hiring agency/consultants? How can we improve and stand out? For those of you who haven’t done consulting/agency work, here’s a brief glimpse of personally why I don’t really want to be here anymore. - the diversity in projects is BS. Yes, you get clients that are different, but often the core problems you work on are all very similar. You basically find a framework in your first two projects or so and re-apply it to every problem, because there’s so little depth to the work. - It’s difficult to show impact. You’re often brought on for MVP and then taken off, or brought on to fill a role within a team in an embedded role for an amount of time. You don’t get to see lifecycles often, which imo affects design quite a bit more than engineering consultants. - sometimes can feel like you’re a second class citizen, when in all reality, in my experience consultants are often equally skilled or even more skilled than in-house co-workers. Not all the time though. I’ve been treated very well and often as an expert, too. - you do even less user research than usual because clients very rarely want to pay for it, or they believe they’ve already done it and send you a slide deck of useless takeaways from 2 years ago. I’ve been able to work around this but as a whole, but I spend so much of my time and energy just fighting to interview users or send surveys. - the higher you climb, it often doesn’t seem like the problems themselves get more challenging or interesting. What it seems to often mean is that you get handled the tough clients with diva CEOs or the overly ambiguous problem that sales should never have sold in the first place. It’s an elevation of the difficulty of consulting, less so than of craft or design strategy. - related to the previous point, I feel like I can’t really learn from my team. the folks higher level than me, imo, just aren’t impressive. They’re great consultants but eh designers. There’s so much for me to learn still but I feel like I end up teaching myself or looking elsewhere rather than internally at amazing peers, unless I wanted to learn how to sell projects and work. - wlb is totally dependent on the project. I’m lucky that mine is fantastic. Others are not nearly as lucky. - comp is low lol Don’t get me wrong. I like my job a lot, it’s fully remote, I’ve learned a ton, they respect me, and I adore my client team. But thinking towards the future, I can’t shake the feeling that consulting is a dead end and the longer I stay the harder it will be to get out. Especially because this is not my first career. Tc: 140k Yoe: 2