FTE Consulting is Good, Not Great - Anonymous employee AIM Consulting Group, LLC Employee Review

AIM keeps requiring more and more of their consultants. As part of branding themselves as experts in 2025, they're now requiring Senior Consultant and above to have a professional level cert maintained. No salary bumps, no discussion, just this is the new requirement to work here. It makes sense for cloud partner status, but there's not a lot of value in it for the consultant. The majority of our work isn't cloud work, it's coding. It's hard to find motivation to do it outside of being fired if I don't. I find no value in it, so I just have to get it done if I want to continue to be an FTE. In the last year or so, leadership has required us to be in-office once a month for a team meeting. It's not a big deal, but is largely a waste of time to drive to the office and have a hour and a half meeting for team building reasons every month. I knew that FTE consultants had internal nonbillable time, but new cert requirements make this less worth it now. This wasn't a thing for W2 because it was just paid by the hour, but paid vacation time is nice as an FTE. If leadership keeps asking for more and not paying anything more, then contracting may be better because they don't have to do any of this. A few hours here and there is fine, but I don't want to spend lots of time outside of work on stuff like this because I have a life.