6 weeks to CSC — realistic or am I being too optimistic?

6 weeks is realistic. I did it in 5 while managing two active client engagements. The key is consistency — 45 minutes every day beats a 4-hour session on Sunday followed by nothing for a week.

11 years of real consulting experience is worth a lot here. I came in with 5 years and felt like the exam was validating things I already knew rather than teaching me new concepts. 40 hours should be more than enough for someone with your background.

The business development section was the one that surprised me too, same situation as you — I do it fine in practice but couldn't have named the frameworks off the top of my head. Spent about 2 of my final prep weeks just on that section and it paid off.

The exam is multiple choice, scenario-based, not open book.

What study materials are you planning to use? That's probably the bigger variable than time at this point. Some of the prep resources I found were pretty thin and I ended up supplementing with the official body of knowledge document, which was dense but comprehensive.

Six weeks is tight but doable with your background -- I almost bailed around week three because the csc professional standards best practices section was way more detailed than I expected and I wasn't retaining anything. Took a day off, reset, and just started drilling practice questions instead of re-reading the same pages.

Honestly your consulting experience helps more than you'd think. You're not starting from zero, you're just learning how the CSC frames things it expects you to already know. Don't cram -- pace yourself and you'll be fine.

Six weeks is doable with your background, honestly. The consulting experience helps more than people realize because you've already internalized a lot of the judgment calls the CSC tests. What I'd say is don't just drill questions and move on when you get something right. The thing that actually moved the needle for me was obsessing over why wrong answers were wrong, not just flagging the right one. I spent a lot of time on csc professional standards best practices questions because that section trips people up and the distractors are sneaky, they're almost right in a way that feels plausible.

The other thing is pacing. Six weeks sounds tight but it's really about how focused your study sessions are. If you're doing an hour of scattered reading you're wasting time. Tight blocks where you do a set of questions, then reconstruct the reasoning for every single choice, wrong or right, that's where the retention actually happens. You'll probably find after week three that concepts start clicking faster because you're building a framework, not just a list of facts.