Company: IBM
Date: 2014-08-29
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

Consultant- Consulting by Degrees: Avoid this program if you are looking for career progress, learning, interesting work
Pros: Big, well-known company that looks impressive on a resume
Salary- the pay is decent (not great) and a signing bonus is bigger than other companies' bonuses
Easy to leave- it's a well known company, so a lot of my peers had no trouble finding new jobs when they wanted to leave and most of us were approached by a few recruiters based on the company name alone
Cons: Work- The work given to CbD consultants is often boring, administrative office work.  For example, a project used eight CbDers to update whiteboards and type PDFs to word documents and other similar tasks.  The work was uninteresting and required almost no brainpower.  I felt like I learned very little.  

Career growth/learning opportunities- The program boasts about lots of learning opportunities, but these amount to videos about how to dress and act in the workplace, not actual learning.  New hires get a "buddy" as a mentor. The buddy is just another CbDer who is required to send several form emails and chats per year.  The mentoring is not with a person you will meet or interact with regularly.  

Ability to try new things:  For growing your career by moving projects, good luck.  Projects often are contracts based on number of people, so they don't care who you are or what you do at your desk as long as you clock in and out so the client pays for you.  Projects will not let you leave to move to new projects, no matter what the CbD program advertises.  If you are thinking you can innovate and work on strategy projects, think again.  That's a joke.

Management- In CbD, your manager manages a hundred other people in the same program.  You will talk to her twice a year and be evaluated by her (everyone pretty much gets the same rating no matter how good or bad your performance is).  Managers are supposed to be allies who help advance your career.  They mainly seemed to care about numbers- how many people do I have, how many are on projects (any projects, does not matter what they do on those projects)

CbD advertises like it's a strategy or at least management consulting job.  It's not.  It's basic technology implementation.  You will spend a lot of time bored doing nothing but working long hours bc you need to clock in and out.