Pluspunten
- generally interesting work because it’s about growth, strategy, innovation, and future-oriented thinking - strong peer group, fun to work with, nice people from great schools - junior level consultants are generally from diverse background (industry, experience, personal) - generalist, great industry exposure - working with senior leadership (often can be C-suite) on some of their most challenging issues - small company feel, but may be becoming more “corporate” - we do high quality work, you will learn great consulting skills, we compete with top firms on strategy projects, and despite the cons I will list below, many clients chose us and felt they made the right choice to switch (after big firms embedded themselves there for years), and they sometimes tell us directly!
Minpunten
- promotion cycle is slow, frustrating, and opaque. You will most likely fall behind in title and thus resume compared to your classmates who went to other firms. - despite having unique IP (some from Clay Christensen), the firm can be better at BD, getting the name out there, and even recruiting (total lack of investment and presence at the target schools) - scoping of work. Right now there are many more partners and associate partners than analysts, and about equal to the headcount of associates and senior associates. I’m not sure this is the right structure of a productive firm. Often our projects are over-scoped and despite some effort to promote work life balance, you should expect very long hours - lack of diversity continue to persist at mid to high level. The firm’s promotion criteria are both written and also measuring if you “have it”. Therefore the leadership tend to promote (faster) people with certain types of personality, if not by skin color or cultural background. The firm has deployed very limited resources to diversity recruiting (and delegate to junior consultants without truly empowering them). We had to layoff some people due to COVID, and it seemed that minorities were significantly more severely impacted. - Mentorship exist but effectiveness and experience seem to vary significant depending on who your development leader is. And the sentiment is that this lead to varying success of retaining consultants from diverse backgrounds - we’ve heard from reliable sources that the leadership in general did not believe that they have biases or they need unconscious bias training