Company: Deloitte
Date: 2014-10-13
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Federal Consulting: Excellent People, Sub-Par Culture
Pros: Smart, engaging people
Excellent maternity/paternity leave practices
Opportunity to move to different clients every year or so
Several career tracks
Opportunity to expand your breadth of experience if you take the personal initiative to pursue stretch roles and personal development
Cons: Overall Deloitte Consulting, LLP: 

- The vacation/PTO system is misleading. You receive 5 weeks but each day of vacation, holiday, or sick time utilized counts against you by negatively impacting your utilization - which is a key metric in your year end performance evaluation and impacts your raise.  Work life "fit" is emphasized in speech, but utilization targets are set very high.

- Expectations for contributing to internal initiatives (beyond your client work) can add significant time to your work week

- Company is enormous.  The performance evaluation process is so far removed from individual projects that it may not accurately reflect performance.

Federal consulting, specifically: 
 - The government will often not take the recommendations needed to create true, positive change.  This can make this type of work unfulfilling (this is outside Deloitte's control but is important to know when considering this type of client)
- Deloitte practitioners execute at a much higher level than federal employees can; however, many roles filled by consultants could be staffed by much less expensive workers and billed at a lower rate.
- Managers frequently attempt to keep practitioners on projects significantly past the mutually agreed-upon timeframe.  The focus is on having a practitioner in the seat, rather than accounting for that practitioner's career development -- and employees who insist on the original timeline are not considered team players.