Pros
• Great people • Good training for college new hires • Good project experience • My personal experience with my practice lead and HR personnel has been very good. They have an open door policy and are willing to work with you to pinpoint your interests and capabilities, if you approach them. • Some projects are very flexible, allowing teleworking. • Opportunity for promotion • Career coaching and mentor programs have great intent and work well, if you have a good person. My personal experience with my career coach has been awesome. • Tuition reimbursement is top notch. • Decent benefits • Ability to move internally if you so choose • Excellent learning portal with a wide variety of courses. Very useful when on the bench.
Cons
• New hire processes and orientation are not standardized across the organization. People in other divisions did not have the positive orientation experience that I did. • Promotion process is long and drawn-out with lots of paperwork and evidence needed to prove your value. This is in the process of being revamped, but more of this stuff could be automated. • Matrixed org structure with horizontals that support vertical divisions. This is good for varied work experience, but makes the horizontal consulting practice dependent on verticals. As a result, the consulting practice doesn’t have as many of their own projects. Consultants are contracted out to the verticals as support, but verticals will always try to fill positions with their people first. This contributes to the organization not meeting their numbers, and thus employees are not compensated well even if they do get promoted. (Just a theory) I understand that tough economic times are also a major factor, but we have to be able to adjust accordingly. • Relatively high turnover, which means that they spend more money paying new people competitive salaries rather than giving current employees better raises. (My perception) Cost of living increases are about 3-4% annually, and my promotion resulted in a 7% total raise, with cost of living included. People at our competitors can expect to receive a 20% raise after a promotion, but they meet their numbers. See above theory. • Limited project opportunities for people in certain practices • We work to implement quality technology solutions for our clients, but lack in our own technology platforms. If we can implement technology solutions for our clients and claim it is the best thing to use, it should be good enough for us, and we should be able to implement it for ourselves.