Company: Deloitte
Date: 2016-05-24
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

WARNING- Only for extroverts and experts - S & O consulting
Pros: Please note, this is only for strategy and operations folks.

Deloitte Consulting is an amazing company with an amazing reputation. The training is top notch. Deloitte university is still the coolest place I've ever been to in my life. If you love traveling, then this is the best place to be. You'll quickly rack-up some major points and privileges, plus you can flex your travel I.e instead of returning home every week, you can choose to travel to other parts of the country and spend weekends there. Back office support is really top notch, things like expenses, and HR stuff are well planned and executed. Work life balance varies from person to person and project to project. The Deloitte name on your resume does not hurt, I get pestered by recruiters every single day because of my experience working there. Also, the pay varies a lot. If you're hired from a top MBA, then your pay may be competitive with the MBBs, but if you're joining from a smaller firm or non-consulting, they'll offer an increment on your current salary
Cons: Notice that I didn't say anything about the actual work in the pros section. If you're coming here for hard core strategy work, then good luck finding that unicorn. Project work, even in S&O, is mostly some type of technology implementation support where the S&O folks tend to be the project managers or business process planners. Clients seem to engage Deloitte after they've made their strategic decisions and need a firm with a large implementation manpower in technology, human capital or business process transformations. Trust me, the day to days on these projects are not worth your time. 
The above paragraph only applies to folks who can find a project. The staffing model at Deloitte is downright horrific. I still get nightmares from what I had to do to get staffed there I.e kiss a lot of butts. When you join, you're basically internally unemployed, so you have to do everything you will do if you are actually looking for a job. I.e get a watertight resume, which you'll have to customize to any job openings, then apply for those jobs with a cover email. Then interview, then also have good referrals. Yep, it's a job market, and just like every job market, all the rules of competition, unconscious biases and stereotypes applies to. So to give yourself a fighting chance, you have to be known by the right people, which means, you need to network your butt off. I'm an introvert, but I had more than 50 1 on 1s with senior folks when I joined the firm. I don't think it helped much, as I still spent my first 3 months at the firm without a billable project I.e on the beach. It's not uncommon to see folks who have been on the beach for an entire review cycle (6 months), those get fired ASAP as they are seen to not fit the firm culture. At Deloitte, you are in charge of your own career, which also means you are on your own!!!
Being successful here is not really about how smart you are, you only get the chance to show that if you are properly staffed. It's really about being able to navigate this behemoth of a firm effectively and ensuring the system works in your favor. This can only happen if you are someone who is well liked by the right people and can secure nice projects on a consistent basis (even before most other folks find out about the project), hence the title of this review. I've also seen folks who have some specific sort after skills be successful here e.g the firm did a lot of EMR implementation projects for hospitals when I was there, so people with experience in EMR softwares or folks with strong healthcare provider backgrounds were in high demand (again, this is all implementation stuff).