Company: KPMG
Date: 2016-04-23
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Great place to build a career! (Fed Audit practice)
Pros: This review speaks mainly for the Federal audit practice.

- KPMG has the market share of federal audits and advisory, and wins new contracts every year. They're contracted with some of the largest agencies in the government and the work has been really interesting so far.

- Great place to start a career. You learn a ton, usually see several different clients throughout the year, and are given responsibility pretty early if you meet performance expectations.

- Extra-curricular, work-sponsored opportunities including 48 hours of volunteer release time per year, diversity networks, awesome firm or practice-wide events, involvement in recruiting, etc. You can even have up to five mentors of your choosing that get a budget every quarter to take you out.

- Decent healthcare, 25 days off, and pretty flexible outside of busy season. Busy season is only 6 weeks in the Fed Practice (no extensions!). 

- The Fed Practice is led by an incredible person who cares about personal communication at all levels. I've found that with all of the partners that I've interacted with, too. The people at this firm care about each other a lot, and I rarely feel like I'm a number.
Cons: - During the Federal off-season (Jan-Feb), many associates are sent to a commercial busy season job out-of-town. It's a really incredible learning experience, and if you hate travel you can communicate that and they will try to find you something in-town. It's really hard to have zero travel on this job, though.

- Wish they indexed our salaries better to the cost of living in DC. Colleagues in Raleigh make only a couple thousand less but have a dramatically lower cost of living there. It's really hard using half of my salary for rent every month.

- Busy season, but that goes for all public accounting jobs.