Company: Deloitte
Date: 2008-11-20
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

Great place to start a career and to continue it as long as you move around and find your niche.
Pros: Excellent training, especially the 3-year ACA. It's also good to be surrounded by very intelligent people, but this will vary depending on your service line. Most of the people I work with got a First in Economics and almost all have a Masters or PhD in Economics. It can be very stimulating to have varied problems and always have to be thinking of new approaches to unusual issues.

It's also relatively to move internally and internationally (although not as easy at this moment). I qualified in Audit then moved to Economic Consulting and so get to use my skills but don't have to go through the monotony of Audits. These are great for teaching financial skills, but I couldn't recommend it as a long-term career option - hence why I moved to a specialised area within Corporate Finance.

It's also useful to have a Big 4 name on your CV rather than a smaller practice. The scope for larger, more complex and more interesting projects is therefore bigger at Deloitte than much of the competition.
Cons: At the bottom it can be very dull with relatively low pay, but this is compensated for via the ACA qualification which makes you very employable. As you progress, you get more control over work hours and which projects you work on, but I've been lucky and many people can end up with tough hours and repetitive work.

There's also a huge amount of bureaucracy, as you'd expect in a large organisation. This can be a real bore and take up large amounts of time. Throughout much of the firm you're also expected to put your life on hold for work, but this largely depends on how good your managers/Partners are and how much they care - there's a lot of variety but most expect hard work and work life to be the absolute priority.