Company: KPMG
Date: 2014-02-14
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Still a great place to start an accounting career, but your mileage may vary
Pros: The top reason smart young accounting graduates come to any Big 4 firm remains the same: Big 4 firms remain an excellent CFO training ground, with a clear path to promotion and an absolutely amazing opportunity to learn the ins and outs of accounting, finance, and business.

Having spent eight years in the audit practice, and now a wiser senior manager, I have to say that I don't regret staying as long as I have. I've grown, matured, and improved myself both personally and professionally thanks to my time at KPMG. I have found mentors that have helped me discover new abilities I didn't know I had, and have discovered that some of the most rewarding parts of my career involve those moments when I can see my staff begin to understand audit or accounting concepts for the first time. For the most part, the people I work with on a day-to-day basis are outstanding, extremely intelligent, and have many skillsets I would love to learn over time. I know that if I were to stay longer, I'd only have more opportunities for future growth, with the potential to lead multi-million dollar engagements and meet CFOs, CEOs and board members of Fortune 100 companies.

KPMG has given me amazing opportunities and I have taken them. I have traveled across the country for project and trainings, transferred to different offices, have had the opportunity to work in cities of my choosing. I came to the firm as an unsteady first-year, and today, as a senior manager, I am confident that the firm has made me a successful professional with a skillset that would be the envy of many of my peers. I took time to invest in public speaking skills as a national instructor, volunteered for difficult projects to learn about accounting topics and tasks in which I was unfamiliar, and worked hard on my communications skills so that my staff see me not just as a boss and scary senior manager, but as a mentor they can trust and come to in difficult times. 

KPMG has helped make me who I am today, and that's a good thing. Despite the negatives below, would I say KPMG is a great place to be?  Sort of. It's a great training ground, but unless you enjoy the partner lifestyle, it's a questionable place to stay for a lifetime.
Cons: Unfortunately, KPMG is not all rainbows and unicorns. While, on balance, I have learned a great deal during my time at the firm, there are a few things that really hurt the firm's ability to retain people.

First, the partner group is often rather aloof, distant, and totally disconnected from the young professionals that work for them. Yes, perhaps they too struggled and worked hard during their early days, but for the vast majority, that was 20+ years ago, and the world has changed since then. Today's young professionals are looking for more than a stable career and a paycheck, and unless the firm is able to provide more than that, the most talented professionals will continue to leave. The lack of investment and attention to things such as proper mentoring, career guidance, patience, and care simply astounds me at times. The fact that the firm will do nothing to retain top performers boggles my mind. If the top-rated senior or manager is thinking about leaving the firm, what will they do?  Certainly not pay them more. They will pay lip service to rearranging workloads so that the top performers aren't burned out, but that never happens in reality. It's wasted opportunity after wasted opportunity. People are simply not appreciated and valued enough, especially when they should be the firm's most valued resource. 

Second, the slave labor factor still exists. In a world where income inequality has become a rallying cry for millions, the same disconnected and aloof partner group often jokes about how, if you stay to partner, you'll be very, very, very well compensated. Well, that doesn't really make anyone else feel better. Nor does it make any of us, who work so hard for so little, want to work any harder so you can make more money, especially as we are compelled to find efficiencies that may not exist. It's easy as a partner to tell a team to send more work to India. The reality on the ground is that it is not as easy as it sounds. The fact is that for years, young staff have been content to be paid little in exchange for an amazing start to their career, with interesting learning and good mentorship. Lately, KPMG has failed on those counts.

Finally, the firm is too conservative, with too much bureaucracy, too many layers, and too many checklists that are redundant. While I understand risk mitigation is important, KPMG has always been the most conservative of the Big 4, and from speaking with peers and competitors, it is clear we are the firm that gets in our own way the most.  The other firms clearly enjoy economies of scale that we do not, but because of the way the firm operates, with local partners not even allowed to run their own practices properly, we miss out on too many opportunities for improvement.