Company: Deloitte
Date: 2019-10-15
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Consultant
Pros: 1. Progression is almost guaranteed for the first 5 years - up to Manager level.

2. Highly social organisation with an unusually high concentration of very strong, generalists, especially at the more junior levels. You can develop relationships with hundreds of people that will go on to operate all aspects of Ireland Inc. over the next 10 years.

3. Decent (but pretty limited) exit opps. For S&O, most consultants move into Sales or Customer Success at a tech company. For Tech/Digital, most consultants go into analytics or engineering elsewhere. If you stick around long enough to become a Manager (5-6 years) you have significantly more options available.
Cons: 1. Performance appraisal, bonuses, and promotions are based on management's opinion of you which is vulnerable to manipulation, bad actors, and incompetence.  

2. Management do not receive training in people management so ability varies wildly. Additionally, performance appraisal is 100% based on your superiors' opinions, so weak people managers routinely blame their shortcomings on external factors and get away with it.

3. Majority of staff are effectively "leased out" to a bank for several years, gaining very little useful experience, no development of commercial acumen, and earn significantly less than the bank would have paid them as an employee.

4. Salaries are *significantly* below standard. I've heard of Consultants/SCs doubling their salary after leaving. Even with a top performance rating (0-1% of staff per year) the bonuses are insultingly low.

5. A strong culture of dishonesty, "spinning", salesmanship, and saying one thing while doing another. Very little domain knowledge from senior staff. Zero rigour or planning applied by staff below Director level.

6. Firm rewards action for the sake of action. Heavy bias to moving fast and attacking problems with the first thing that comes to mind, rather than trying to find the right solution before acting.

7. No analytical or quantitative acumen in Consulting, with the exception of Analytics

8. The firm leans very heavily on the reputations of the US and UK firms. "Strategy and Operations" in Ireland is really "Sales and Project Management." Most staff in this division could make significantly more money doing the same job elsewhere with an honest job title.

9. Culture is viewed as marketing nonsense and is poorly conceived. For example: "an unwavering commitment to each other" is a deeply inappropriate value for a professional services firm. If I make a mistake in a regulated business I need to know my colleagues will hold me to account, not help me bury the body.