Company: Deloitte
Date: 2018-10-29
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

A complete waste of time
Pros: There really aren't that many positives about Deloitte Consulting in South Africa, particularly the Johannesburg office.
Cons: This is particularly a review of ~2 years in the Johannesburg consulting practice.

1. For all potential hires with experience from tier 1 consulting firms - do not bother applying to Deloitte (South Africa). Your time will be wasted in a place packed with inexperienced people who have no desire to know what true consulting means beyond their limited experience. The resistance to change was extremely high especially with Senior Managers and above; there is general fear of "new" ways of doing business presented by experienced consultants as senior managers and associate directors scramble to get to the top of the food chain.
2. Very little of the work done adds any value to clients. All the typical consulting cliches are found here: it looks pretty, it sounds confusing (peppered with consulting terms with little meaning), results are not measurable or sustainable. Consultants are not learning much from the work they deliver. The bias of "sales over quality" is embedded in the business. 
3. Very little regard for harvesting and using of IP, a lot of "re-inventing" the wheel which is frustrating for new people. This is largely driven by the point above, the work sold is not repeatable and as such very little can be documented as good IP for future use.
4. Typical breeding ground for "pull him/her down syndrome" to get ahead. The performance management system is pathetic. There is little in the system that enables an individual to set goals and track performance against goals through solid record-keeping. Instead, "roundtable discussions" are held annually by management to discuss individual performance by managers without any facts or evidence being used to justify performance ratings. Anything goes in these year end review discussions - a manager who has worked 2 weeks with a consultant can decide the outcome for an individual for an entire year - no facts are used.
5. If you are results driven, this is no place for you. Very little actions are ever completed, basic project management skills exist in the management team as a result any internal improvement projects hardly see the light of day. Many things are talked about but nothing ever gets done. Management mostly shifts the blame to "company policy" or generally make it a consultant's problem to sort out with no support from the top.
6. The bar is very low for new hires - anyone can get in here, the concept of "merit" doesn't exist and there is no standardisation for interviewers to rely on when assessing whether candidates are good or bad. The case study used is boring and unchallenging and probably well-known out there. Interviewers receive no training.