Company: KPMG
Date: 2010-08-15
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former

Experience of working at KPMG UK
Pros: *Great HR department, most HR/IT processes well thought out.
*On boarding of new staff well designed and helpful.
*Ability to work from Home via a well design VPN system.
*Expense and travel systems easy to managed and work out.
*Recording of Time (utilisation) system great, so easy to work and use
*Mentoring program available, but you really need to make sure you push and personally manging the mentor for it to actually happen.
*Learning system/Education - Have a fantastic learning system, that you can do online training, check out books of the KPMG Library, book KPMG training and non-KPMG training (though both of these need to get approval from your line manager, the non-KPMG training you need to provide a case)
*Very supportive of Accountants, or staff doing ACA and auditors. See con for downside.
Cons: *Top heavy structure, limited room for promotion.
*Limited support for IT, Change Management, People etc Advisory groups. As Accountants trump all, this has left KPMG being viewed as only auditors in the market place.
*To get bonuses or promotions a need to have been hired by a Partner, or being working directly with a partner. Otherwise the twice yearly senior management moderations on staff performance will mean that you have no effective support during this critical assessment. 

It is clear that most (80/20 rule) staff with low performance ratings usually are actually not poor performers but unfortunately do not have direct partner sponsorship. However there is a great PIP (Performance Improvement Plan process to help, but usually this is not needed as your rating had no real reflection of you actual performance or how the clients saw you)

This is because the twice yearly assessment process while designed to be based on competencies by HR, is overridden by the partners and senior managers’ moderation process. The core feed to the moderation is evidence of performance from each engagement review and your utilisation numbers. Client feedback even if glowing is often not taken into account, as this will be diluted out by the engagement review process. If you do not have a partner supporting you during this process, it does not matter how well you do, even if you get the top ratings throughout your engagements, you line manager loves you. They bell curve the ratings so if the partner wants to push someone else you will get a poor performance rating regardless.

The engagement reviews (project reviews) while having the necessary flexibility are very arbitrary assessment by the engagement manager (I know as I had to provide several myself). These assessments are poorly controlled for bullying and have no spot review of engagement managers assessments throughout the year (so while you can dispute a review, this effectively a re-review by the same engagement manager, or even if another manager/director they cannot change the review so you are stuck with the assessment regardless). Unfortunately this means that many engagement managers get into company politics which are reflected the reviews. For instance: London staff who are working on jobs up North for Northern engagement managers will get poor engagement reviews regardless, as Northern Engagement managers want to ensure north staff get better reviews on the whole, as performance is measured across the group country wide. So it pays to give bad reviews to staff you do not manage, to make yourself look good on the whole.

*Utilisation targets have been increased dramatically, this means senior managers, directors are not able to spend their time getting the sales through proposals as they need to have much higher billable hours recorded. The targets are that significantly high, that they have started to do work 1-2 levels down from their position to meet their financial targets. This has meant that staffs at lower levels are no longer getting the experience to grow and learn on the job.