Company: Deloitte
Date: 2015-06-03
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

Disappointed experienced hire in Consulting.  Not for everyone, including me.
Pros: Great pay and benefits, prestigious name, and mostly nice people. 

Lots of opportunities if you are fresh out of business school or an experienced management consultant in a main stream business line.
Cons: Highly matrixed organization makes it difficult to figure out who to talk to about particular issues. 

The firm is big on networking, yet it is very difficult to find people who work on projects or for clients you are interested in because of the highly matrixed nature of the firm. You can use Deloitte People Network (an internal version of LinkedIn) to identify people with similar interests, but not everyone keeps their profiles up and many tend to keep project and client details generic, which makes it difficult to target networking efforts. 

On day one, I was shocked to learn that it was on me to find work within the firm and that my ability to get staffed on a project was largely dependent on how successfully I networked.  Since networking is a lot of work for me and I prefer to use my energy doing the job rather than politicking, this was not welcomed news.  

Although they assign you a resource manager, a counselor (your rating official), and an on-boarding buddy, you are really on your own to figure most things out.  Everybody has a full-time job and they don't have a lot of time to help you navigate the new landscape. Also, they may not have any understanding of why you were hired or your areas of interest and that makes it difficult for them to empathize with your situation. 

No room for even the smallest mistake.  The brand and the premium charged for services depends on perfection and they beat that into you as you on-board. The problem is that humans are fallible and you can't be perfect all the time.  The overwhelming emphasis on perfection the first time you do something has made me hesitant to try new assignments. And, because I'm highly specialized in an area outside of the mainstream Consulting business lines, I'm extremely limited on where I can add value. 

One reason I joined Deloitte Consulting was to learn new things and experience new work areas. However, tight timeliness on seemingly every task makes it difficult for you to learn how to do new things and most of the training I've received so far has not been sufficient for me to actually master the task. 

They dump a lot of training on you when you first on-board and you won't have a chance to use much of it for a while, if ever.  You'll check the box and stay busy your first several weeks, but you won't retain much of what you learn and that will make you feel like you wasted your time. 

Some training is really not training at all.  It's designed to see if they can break you down by putting you in impossible situations and see how you respond. They'll give you a task that would take someone who knows what they are doing weeks to accomplish and they'll ask you to do it in 30 mins.  Then they'll change the rules and give you 10 minutes. The only thing that did for me was shake my confidence and resent the process. 

Extensive use of "consultant speak" makes it difficult to understand what people are saying if you don't know the language. This makes it even more difficult to integrate with the firm. 

When you ask for help from internal service units, people frequently tell you to contact someone else and they use a generic title that you have no way of knowing who that is because there is no directory or functional structure. It often takes me 3 or 4 emails to identify the person I need to talk with to resolve an issue.