Prospective Associates/Associate Consultants - Don't do it. - Associate Consultant C Space Employee Review

Politics, not merit, dictate career advancement in client services. - Department managing directors had pet associate consultants (second lowest position) reporting into them. Intended reporting structure is two levels up (associate to senior, senior to director, director to VP/managing director). - Performance reviews were inconsistent, subjective (you self-select who will review your performance from your teams, and both the tool and performance matrix have no numerical score for benchmarking purposes), and cringe-worthy. I had a teammate with flawless performance be told they wasn't being considered for a promotion because they weren't more like X consultant in the department. Staffing/Workload - C Space is a hair on fire agency that is most likened to a boot camp. Approximately through the associate director level, expect to work 10ish hours a day and about three full weekend days. HR/dept directors will cry foul here but set up an informational interview with someone who has left C Space to get an accurate picture. Unless you have children, you will stay to finish the work. Terrible/non existent manager training. If you have a bad manager here, get out as soon as you can. Politics again rear its head here - a top performing senior consultant was put on a performance plan because she was observed to be consistently 3-5 minutes late to her meetings (never mind she was managing 3 accounts and 2 teams herself flawlessly). Beware the Kool Aid. It's quite strong. Senior leadership seems committed to its values without prioritizing market level compensation, L2/L3 management training and continued ed, and managing director/VP servant leadership. Abysmal associate/associate consultant training. If you're new to market research or fresh out of college, strongly recommend against coming here. There are plenty of other bigger, more established brands with better thought-out learning tracks AND better starting salaries. This was the experience of associates before me, my own cohort (who has all left), and three L1s who joined a year after me. I don't foresee this changing.