1st year analst - Analyst Charles River Associates Employee Review

I'll break this down into 3 components: work life/culture/seniormanagement, exit opportunities, advice to potential recruits 1. Work Life/Culture/ Senior Management CRA primarily works in the context of litigation consulting, most people here would much rather be in management consulting ( I know I would). That being said, work life here can be difficult, you're dealing with experts, lawyers, HR, and project managers that had phD' with no idea how to lead. The cases (usually the defendant) hires their counsel (lawyers) who then hire experts (CRA). Often times our clients are not in the complete right, so you'll often have a hard time morally justifying your work. The skills you learn are not useful at all in today's business environment, outside of academia or economic consulting. SAS MIGHT be useful, but chances are you won't need it. R is extremely useful for alot of jobs but its difficult to learn and your ability to learn it while working here is determined by whether you need it or not. 2. exit opps as touched on earlier, you don't gain as much skills that are transferable as in management consulting. From management consulting, you can go to PE, VC, Banking, MBA, corp dev, econ consulting (idk why you would), etc. From economic consulting, you can essentially only continue with econ consulting, or go to some type of school (MBA,Law, phD). Your skill set just isn't applicable for most jobs, as most jobs don't have a legal component to it. Not to mention that the analysis you do is backwards thinking (since its after the fact) 3. advice to potential recruits CRA would be a good place if you only want to work at one place before you go off to bschool or something else. If you do decide to work here (or forced to as in my case) don't stay longer than a year, the older you get, the less employable you become (many others have said this for economic consulting, not just CRA specifically)