Company: KPMG
Date: 2017-11-07
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

A Great Place to Build a Career in Checking Boxes and Working Past Midnight
Pros: - Colleagues are smart and fun. As a result, office parties are fun, and I've made some great friends at the firm - which is definitely helped by a "we can get through this together" mentality during busy season.

- There are some great managers and partners that set a great example on how to think and act in a professional setting.

- The employee networks are amazing - especially pride@kpmg. They have an amazing annual conference with some truly inspiring speakers and workshops.

- Pay is fair, and amount of PTO days (25!) is great.

- You get to see a wide variety of businesses, and I personally loved going on plant tours to see how things are made. Gives you a broad understanding of how businesses work, from manufacturing to sales to profit.

- It is a good resume builder due to the name recognition.
Cons: - It's true that the job opens up opportunities in your career, but mostly into the roles you don't want (internal audit, accounting or financial reporting). If you want to switch to something more interesting (like marketing, operations, sales or even just plain corporate finance), you will need to work a lot harder to find a role with a company that will take a chance on you, because in their eyes, you don't have the experience yet - no matter how many years you have in external auditing. Even recruiters try to funnel you into an internal audit role with the promise that after a couple years, you'll potentially be able to transfer into finance or another role.

- Crazy hours. Not as bad as investment managers, but the kind of bad that makes you wonder what you're doing with your life to do this to yourself for a job you hate. And the sad part is that you get used to it.

- The KPMG clients in Chicago - at least from a consumer and industrial standpoint - are not very sexy. No Walgreens or Sears or McDonald's - just mostly smaller industrial clients that no one has heard of, and they're located so far out in the burbs that you spend over 2 hours in a car every day. Not as much flexibility with working from the office as I thought I'd have, mostly driven by managers who live in the burbs and insist on the team being out there with them.

- When I started in 2013, managers would try to encourage us by saying how the longer you stay, the greater flexibility you get, and it was true. However, within the course of 4 years, countless PCAOB inspection failures and an increasing culture of inspection paranoia, I saw this change drastically to the point where senior managers and even partners were working past midnight just like the staff. There was no longer a clear incentive to staying - especially when compiled with the fact that the job shifted to being 75% SOX/controls documentation. You soon realize that SOX work is a complete check-the-box kind of exercise where no one really cares if the client got it right - only that our documentation is good enough to pass inspection.

- This seems to always be the norm, but no one in audit was happy with their job. When you go around asking people why they're still there, they say it's because it's a better job than those they see people doing at clients, which are usually roles in financial reporting, internal audit, or accounting. What everyone doesn't realize is that there's a whole world of jobs out there outside of the small bubble of accounting and auditing, but hardly anyone goes outside of the box to find these roles - so they stay and just complain about the job constantly. And I don't blame them, I did that too... because the job is really a bummer.

- Clients tend to not care about the audit (or you), they only want it to be done. And the market hardly cares either, even when you find something "big" and issue a material weakness. Which makes you realize that you're not adding much value to the world, despite the fact that auditors are necessary for a public market.

- Although most people are fun and smart, some managers are really bad. Luckily you get to work with multiple managers all the time so you get to better understand what kind of manager you like, but some are just so stressed out all the time by inspections that they're unreasonable and rude. Like... HR-violations kind of rude.

- If you don't book PTO a year in advance when your schedule is still open, your manager may say no to your PTO request - which tends to happen often when a fire drill is expected every other day and they insist on you being there just in case.

- Although the employee networks are amazing, there is vast underrepresentation of diverse ethnicities in the Chicago office.



In sum: After moving on to my next job and looking back at my 4 years at KPMG, you couldn't offer me a high enough salary to go back to auditing -- especially at KPMG if the culture continues to revolve around inspection paranoia. I'd recommend anyone looking at this job to really think about their future career path and if it's not internal audit, accounting or financial reporting to not go into public accounting. And I bet that whatever other job you find will be 100% more interesting and will allow you to have a life outside of work. Win-win.