Pros
- Fun culture with plenty of opportunities for involvement (groups, activities, etc.) - Room for growth and defined career path - Annual performance-bases raises and bonuses - Good pay, benefits, and vacation - Workplace flexibility
Cons
- New-hire training is a bit much and too overwhelming to really extract anything valuable. You're never really trained on the essential skills and knowledge required to do your job. It's all dependent on on-the-job training and your peers to coach you. - Inconsistency of overall experience based upon which solution (Internal Audit, Risk & Compliance, etc.) you work in. IAFA is all local clients whereas other solutions are very travel heavy. IAFA engagements can be hit or miss and are very SOX heavy. Other solutions are more consultative in nature. - The Chicago office is so focused on growth growth growth and getting new work and clients. However, IAFA is understaffed, leading to limited resources for all this work. This constantly leads to overtime, and an expectation for people to complete work on nights and weekends when needed (this depends on your level). Engagements never end on time, which creates a lot of overlap and extra time spent tying up loose end while still trying to focus on the next engagement you are staffed on. - Hiring focus - Too much emphasis on hiring college grads and not enough experienced hires. Hiring lots of college grads at times helps numbers in terms of staffing, but requires too much additional time spent coaching and developing. - Inconsistency of work styles among upper management. You don't have a single "boss", but instead different groups of leadership on a project-by-project basis. When constantly being led by different people, it makes it hard to develop skills when you're being coached in different and sometimes conflicting ways.
