The company culture isn’t great and higher-ups make it difficult to move up. Management pays lip service to the concerns of lower level consultants, but management’s decisions will always serve the interests of management.
As a lower level consultant, you are expected to never say no and to work late into the night and through the weekends. At Exponent, it is expected that work will be prioritized over family and personal commitments. No matter how many hours you put in, it will never be enough. One year, I had extremely high utilization and billed hundreds of hours of overtime. During my review, I was told that my overtime hours should have been higher. This was extremely discouraging after I’d sacrificed many nights and weekends of personal time for work. Pay is low for the number of hours you are expected to bill.
While some projects are interesting, many are not. Exponent will offer any service to a client with deep pockets, including labor that requires no skill or expertise. There are some very boring projects for big clients that do not help junior consultants develop their skills or provide meaningful client exposure. Management will try to sell these as “exciting” opportunities to junior consultants because they need warm bodies to bill to the projects. However, this work doesn’t lead to career growth, promotions, etc.
Moving up in the company requires receiving marketing credit for projects. Many higher level consultants will deny marketing credit to lower level consultants who should receive some credit for capturing and managing projects. As a lower level consultant, you will have no recourse if a principal decides to take marketing credit you deserve. Since consultants at all levels are rewarded for marketing credit through their bonuses and promotions, higher level consultants have no motivation to help new consultants develop business, or even allow them to receive the credit they deserve on projects they helped bring in and complete. Management will cite instances where new consultants have quickly been promoted to principal through this system. While there are rare instances where this has occurred, it requires much more luck than skill. For every consultant who quickly moves up the company hierarchy, there are dozens who struggle working long hours for several years before stagnating or moving on from Exponent.
These factors lead to substantial turnover among junior consultants. The company has been able to continually backfill those leaving with new PhD graduates, so I don’t believe management is motivated to make changes to address these problems in the near future.
