Company: KPMG
Date: 2016-10-26
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former

Good for the CV but at what cost?
Pros: KPMG is a big four hence you get exposure to the biggest clients and for the biggest projects, which is good to start a career and give it a boost to your CV. You get lunch allowance (but it´s in your salary package and it´s terrible sometimes), latest iPhone with unlimited internet, discounted gym at the company, socials (but not always paid by partners!)
Cons: I joined as an Assistant E1 and not on a grad scheme which resulted in disastrous performance (the team hired me but not knowing what to do with me!). To increase my chargeability, they put me on an internal audit project for a large corporate for which the work was so tedious and boring. I felt very demotivated, plus took a SAP certification course at KPMG and the trainer (who is a manager at the firm) was so bad that 4 of the students failed the real exam and then now have to resist paying the exam themselves. I can say that maybe I was unlucky or it didn´t work (50% my mistake, 50% KPMG´s for not supporting me to achieve success).                                                                            
Assistant managers and managers tend to be very cool with assistants, however I was unlucky with senior managers (mean and even bad people). Don´t join the company as an E1, join on a graduate scheme because you will have something to be assessed against! And definitely work on something that you like (I joined tax and hated it to death) because salaries are not that good to do something you don´t like (who wants to be at KPMG hating his/her job and staying there for 10 years to be a senior manager on 80K?). This is not an investment bank where you can allow yourself to hate your job for the good money. Starting salary was 25k in LONDON and PAYING RENT (not a good deal at all) and 3 years wait to become assistant manager to earn 45k. Also as it´s such a big company you feel so small and unknown.