Company: PwC
Date: 2012-09-10
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Competent and hard-working consultants, insufficient support, politically correct, work-life balance issues
Pros: 1. The overall staff quality is very good: competent and motivated.
2. My own management team was excellent; assignments were challenging, and management appreciated my contributions.
3. The deserving clients with whom I worked needed our help, and like my management, appreciated our team's contribution to improve their processes and performance.
Cons: I was not impressed by corporate PwC:
1. The headquarters politics and the broadcast communications of the firm were very politically correct.  Their particular flavor of political correctness had the feel of a "cynical embracing", rather than actual enthusiasm, which would have been easier to appreciate and/or understand.
2. The Annual Review process was very opaque.  One is evaluated by a committee of people that have not met or worked with the reviewee; they do not know what the reviewee does, except for the broadest strokes. Mechanical measurements are emphasized over one's own management's evaluations.  The focus, even at the non-managerial level of Senior Associate, seemed to be on business development, rather than task performance.
3.  Work-life balance.  Across the firm, PwC has a culture of heavy overtime, especially for Managers and above.  In fact, if one chose to balance work and life, it was likely to be reflected negatively in one's next assessment cycle.
4. There was minimal support to team members at remote or smaller offices.  PwC places an enormous emphasis on meeting the annual training requirements.  However, almost no classroom training of any kind was offered locally (in my smaller market office), and despite plenty of technology, the firm does not offer much in the way of distance learning for the Advisory government consultants.  Most of the training available were self-study online courses.  While the Skillport online classes are adequate as familiarization or reinforcement to certain  business subjects, an actual instructor, as well as classmates with experiences to share, are much more valuable.
5. PwC's corporate financial systems were hard to access, confusing, and time-consuming to use (timesheets, expenses, travel systems).