Some valuable work but gross mismanagement by senior leadership
Pros
Booz Allen does provide excellent support in obtaining continuing education and certifications needed to perform work. Booz Allen still lives on its reputation from the past. It was once a thriving, top employee driven firm with the best and the brightest employees and top level benefits. If you happen to land on the right team and project, it can still be that way. However, as many others have mentioned, that is not the majority of cases anymore. It does have many offices and that can be helpful since employees can work at any location which helps with commutes. Some good managers still exist at the mid-level area in the firm and they do try to support their employees.
Cons
Booz Allen's entire executive management team needs to be replaced...including the recent promotion they had to CEO. They do not understand business strategy (and actually any leadership concepts) and you can't even discuss topics with them without a set of PowerPoint slides that "look pretty." When they say "strategy" at the firm, they really mean "organizational realignment" and not true business strategic planning. So....every year or tow, they move boxes around on the organizational chart and they change the names of the groups. I guess no one has read any Harvard business strategy publications. Shrader was an engineer and lived off the old general market strategy of using client relationships to win additional work. However, the market changed and when clients said they needed to save monies, they cut higher paid employees and still went for "generic work" that others can do. They also cut operating costs without understanding how their changes would impact the work environment for employees. Their strategy to hire employees without having any contracts to place them on was disastrous the first, second, and third time they tried this (it took 3 times of this insanity????). They will probably do it again too. Partners are so far removed from their employees and day-to-day work they don't know what proposals have true chances of winning and what skill sets their team members truly possess. How can you run a business that way? The leadership does not seem to understand that the employees that are available to work and that they are hiring versus the work they are selling is a huge mismatch. Then, they blame internal staff for the problems that they create. They continue to promote employees to higher level management that have no management skills and they do not apply performance measures to management.