Company: KPMG
Date: 2011-12-05
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

A decent place to work, make sure you impress on relationships and not just quality deliverables
Pros: Known path of advancement, better than average compensation, great vacation allotment, opportunity to gain experience within several industries, formal methodologies and training to teach employees the KPMG way. KPMG has a great performance evaluation methodology that includes management's assessment of your work, but it also includes peer and reportee feedback.
Cons: The performance methodology is great however in actual practice this is lacking. Performance ratings at KPMG are done on a 3x3 box (or 9-box). This is more or less a bell curve and your personal relationships and networking can make or break a promotion as well as your salary and compensation for the year. Within KPMG most associate level employees and many managers will share their salaries so everyone knows what their peers salary increases are. My personal experience is I benefited from all of these "cons" but I have seen some of the best workers taken advantage of becuase they are shy or there was a personal conflict, not work related. 

Work like balance and best place for a mother to work are both lip service. These are things that KPMG pays to be a part of and they measure the results based on surveys. Not everyone completes the surveys and most of the employees that are "in the field" are men. Work life balance does not exist and the norm is to work 50+ hours per week and constantly check email. An average of 50% travel is typically that some employees travel 0% and others travel 100% so it averages to 50%. But mostly only the admins are the 0% travelers. 

Work life balance really does not exist. Most Partners (male or female) have their spouse stay at home. This is the only way that the home is able to stay in order since the KPMG employees is likely working upwards of 60 hours a week and traveling at least 2 days a week.

For any of the large professional services firms, if you request to not travel you will have a target on your back. This is not a negative towards KPMG ,but in a professional services company employees have to travel to where the client is in order to get revenue. 

Most KPMG employees laugh at the 5 (or more) weeks of vacation that are given. Most employees do not feel like they can take it. This is truly a perception, which is why it is a con.