Company: PwC
Date: 2016-02-11
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Advisory Management Consulting
Pros: High levels of access to leadership-level clients, opportunities are wide ranging at well-known clients in financial services. A vast majority of colleagues are great people and very talented.  Some opportunities exist for operating model work, assessments of organizational effectiveness, and people & change type work.  Pay is decent, and if you hook on with the right partner, you can ride their wake up the chain quickly.
Cons: Although the firm is trying to establish itself in strategy and customer experience, a majority of the work is software implementation and related work.  Even white glove competitors like McK and BCG are doing the same, so maybe it is inevitable evolution of the market, but they have spent a ton of money on acquisitions of Strategy& and various UX firms, and are not realizing a return on investment.  Also, the strategy people are morphing into very expensive software development pros.

If you live in a small market not close to client work (not NY, BOS, CHI), you're at a distinct disadvantage from a connectivity point of view, and you will spend your life in airplanes and hotels. Most of the work in my group was in the NY/BOS corridor or in small towns scattered around the midwest or northeast.  You will forget what your wife looks like, and your kids will not recognize you when you get home.

Not very well connected internationally - the firm is trying to get better at serving big multi-nationals, but due to the network of separate partnerships and clients being local entities a few rungs below the corporate level, opportunities outside the US are few.

You really have to give everything to the firm - its a big sacrifice from a lifestyle point of view, and honestly bad for your health - many partners who had been at it for a long time had health problems.  You'll away for long periods of time, and working until the wee hours every night.