Company: Deloitte
Date: 2015-06-27
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Great place to start your consulting career
Pros: Deloitte Consulting is a great place to start a career for those just graduating from college. Those who rise up from the analyst level are able to better work the system at Deloitte, compared to experienced hires. Also, as a market leader in quite a few industries, Deloitte has a great variety of clients and is able to provide a rich experience across industries and technologies to its practitioners. You'll be able to work in an area of your own choosing, within reason.

People are generally nice, and there are some truly spectacular people within the firm, those who take the time to mentor you and bring out the best in you. Upper management (Senior Managers, Partners, Principals, Directors) are also generally very accessible.

Compensation is pretty good, until you take into account the items I mention in the Cons section. Vacation time is generous at 5 or 6 weeks, 401k matching, Deloitte contributed pension plan, and an annual incentive program (bonus), along with other benefits and perks. You'll also be able to earn airline miles and hotel points, and do "alternative travel" instead of flying home on weekends.

There is a firm-wide initiative to establish a "Big Firm, Small Feel" to Deloitte, providing flexibility and predictability to Deloitte practitioners. Work-life balance has been a hot topic within Deloitte. This initiative is a pro, as Deloitte leadership recognizes this is a problem, but it is also a con as I'll describe below. 

Deloitte can be a great place to work, especially for those that are competitive, self-motivated and have the drive to advance through the ranks.
Cons: To succeed at Deloitte, you'll need to:

1. Give up any semblance of a normal life. Expect to put in 50-60hours per week on client engagements, at the very least. If you are on an technology implementation with an offshore team, expect your evenings to be sacrificed to dealing with offshore developers. Weekend work is also a possibility, depending on the schedule of your client engagement or other firm activities that are on your place. Also, expect to travel. Whether that's commuting by car because you're on a "local" project or by plane/train, traveling Sun/Mon - Thurs is the expected routine for most Consulting practitioners.

2. Network, network network. If you are not naturally good at selling yourself, you'll need to figure out a way around that real quick. The only way to get on projects quickly is based on the strength of your network. A Resource Manager is assigned to you, and there is an internal project search site, but the best roles are usually staffed before they even appear on the project search system. Where you build your network is also important, as they'll need to be able to speak up for you during consensus meetings. Having a big network in the East in a different service line will not necessarily help you to get that great rating.

3. Contribute to firm activities. On top of your 50-60 hour work week, you’ll need to contribute to the firm in some other way, whether it is by working on pursuits, eminence activities, or other firm initiatives. There’s no way around this. You’ll quickly notice that those who excel at Deloitte Consulting either have no life because they spend all their time working, or they’ve found a PPD/SM who has taken a shine to them and is able to protect them during mid-year and year-end.

4. Find a PPD/SM who you trust, get along with well, and takes a liking to you. Preferably, this PPD/SM will be in the same service line and region as you, so they’ll be in your consensus meetings. Preferably a PPD/SM that is well connected, so they can help you grow your network and ensure that you are staffed on good projects and good roles.

With that said – although you are given 5 to 6 weeks of PTO, it would be impossible to take all of your allocated PTO every calendar year without impacting your utilization. Only client work explicitly counts toward your utilization, so taking PTO while on a project means you are not being utilized. I believe the utilization year is based on a 2000 hour year. You can do the math.

While Deloitte is a market leader in quite a few industries and has top level partnership with several technology providers, they’re not doing enough to ensure those coming up the ranks have the specialized industry knowledge that is required to excel in a specific industry. Practitioners do not choose an industry specialization until the manager level, so may end up working across multiple industries during their formative years at Deloitte. Also, once you are pigeon-holed into a particular technology, it is very hard to branch out to other tools, even though they may be very similar in nature. 

There is also now a tendency to staff off-shore (India) and/or near-shore resources on projects due to cost. There may be one or two functional resources actually at the client site, while there could be a whole group of developers who work half way around the world. Depending on the resources, you’re in for long nights as most off-site resources will lack the functional and business understanding behind requirements, and the actual build may suffer as a result. You’ll have to be able to review the work offshore does with a fine tooth comb depending on the team you’ve got.

The “Big Firm, Small Feel” initiative, in my experience, has not done anything to help with work-life balance. This initiative was supposed to encourage projects to schedule work from home weeks, limit time spent on offshore calls, ensure that PTO can be taken as “personal time off” and not “pretend time off”, and to introduce a measure of predictability in practitioners schedules. However, in practice, this initiative, IMHO, has not met its objectives. Being able to work from home is highly dependent on the client, as some clients need to see its consultants onsite every Monday to Thursday. Off-shore calls are unavoidable for most of us, and due to the shuttle schedule offshore, late evening calls are unavoidable. PTO, even if taken, will have a direct impact on utilization. Unless you are on a long term project where you can plan your PTO against project deadlines, it’ll be very hard to get PTO approved. Basically, while the ideas and objectives behind this initiative are good, the implementation of it is truly lacking.