Exponent reviews

Make sure you don't get hired as an associate if you don't have a degree from an ABET accredited institution. Getting switched to a scientist title is an absolute nightmare. If you are single, willing to sacrifice your relationship, or have an infinitely supportive partner who is willing to do all of the housework and be alone for 12+ hours a day, you can succeed. Tough luck if you also share house responsibilities, want to spend time with your partner, or take maternity leave. Work life balance is frown upon (at least in your first several years), and you are expected to be available at all hours, even if you're on leave (sick, PTO, parental). This company makes money by taking advantage of the "grad school" mentality where you have to continuously prove yourself and work harder and longer hours than anyone else to succeed. You are incentivized with the promise of overtime or a large bonus check, but if a project goes over budget the you're probably the first one to get their time written off, and your bonus will be smaller. Don't believe that you can “pave your own path"-- if there isn't much work to go around when you first start, people won't share work with you, and once you're settled into a “workstream" it's nearly impossible to diversify. You're still expected to socialize and talk with everyone internally that you can to try to get work, but principals will keep work for their own direct reports, and work is not shared across practices unless absolutely necessary. Certain practices are ridiculously cliquey and it all feels like middle school level drama. Associates are treated as disposable, and most leave after ~2 years. Despite the company claiming they're trying to change and fix retention, it's just a facade. Even your exit interview with HR is virtual (via teams) and they won't even give you the courtesy to turn on their camera. Unethical practices amongst senior management is rampant, including overbilling clients and removing names of associates who actually did the work from documents. Principals have gotten to where they are because of luck and timing (economy, others leaving/getting fired, growth of certain industries or client companies), not because they were so much smarter and hard working than their ex-peers. Unless Exponent is your absolute only choice, go elsewhere. If you want to know how much the company is really growing, check the stock over the past 5 years. You won't really even gain much professional experience that's marketable outside of failure analysis. If you do end up at Exponent, figure out what you want from your time there and get out as soon as you can.

You're incentivized to work long hours as an associate/senior associate. It's pro/con - you're compensated for it, but need to define your own boundaries of work-life balance. When I worked there, Exponent offered overtime to associates/senior associates who bill over 85% of the week (e.g. 34 hours in a 40 hour week). For example, if you billed 40 hours to a client project and your hourly rate was $60/hour (Your Salary/2080 hours per year), you were paid an extra $60/hour*6 hours = $360 minus tax. Total compensation was Base Salary + Overtime + Bonus. Overtime was paid biweekly, bonus was minimal and paid ~March/April based on performance reviews. My bonus was ~$2000 the 1st year, and ~$5000 the 2nd year I worked there. I worked 15-25k of overtime each year, so that was the "biweekly bonus". Remember that Exponent is a consulting firm, so they're in the business of selling time (through expertise) to clients. The work-life balance is pretty unsustainable after 2-3 years if you 1) Have a hard time saying "no", 2) Want a family and have a partner who also has a full-time job with minimal flexibility or 3) Prefer to be an individual contributor (IC) and not a people/project manager. Observations and lessons learned: 1) As an associate/senior associate, you're in a catch-22 if you want work-life balance. In your first 6-12 months, you want to say "yes" to all project requests to meet more fellow consultants & build your internal network, but these might include last-minute client requests, and potentially fall on nights/weekends depending on client deadlines and turnaround time needed. Project timelines and client requests can change anytime. There can also be lulls in project work (e.g. when Covid shutdowns first begin). Communication is key: Do not miss important life moments for work (e.g. friend's weddings). Put it on the calendar, communicate it to your manager well in advance (when you know, and 2-4 weeks before the event as a reminder) and prioritize these. I know fellow associates who missed weddings or holidays for last-minute requests: It is never worth it. Prioritize life before work. 2) I don't know a single consultant who didn't work the occasional (or frequent) night or weekend because of a client request. There is a reason clients pay a premium for Exponent to get work done - but it's often at the cost of consultant's "personal" time. For anybody with a family or kids/pets, this means your partner or someone else needs to pick up more roles and responsibilities at home. 3) There isn't a true IC track: As consultants get promoted, their bill rates increase, so they need to shift the amount of time they're focusing on pure "billable hours" to more "business development" to land more projects. They then need to manage the bill rates of consultants (associates/senior associates) staffed on the project to complete the work within budget. If you're interested in purely doing IC work with minimal project/budget management, consulting at the manager level & up is probably not a good fit. On the other hand, if you already have a strong expertise and want to structure project strategy without always executing the detailed work, you could consider it.