Plenty of projects, repetitive frameworks
Pros
Your direct peers and project team members are fantastic, hard working, intelligent people and the sense of team-work is pervasive throughout the junior group. There is a good support structure from Associate Principals and above, but you need to make those connections and nurture those relationships. If you have a Principal or Senior Principal "in your corner" it can go a long way both in being staffed on larger impact projects and your own career/promotion opportunities. Projects tend to span a diverse set of clients from emerging biopharma to global conglomerates. However, the stakeholders with which the consulting group interacts with on the client-side tends to be similar across clients. This is an advantage in some ways as it allows for great networking opportunities with key industry stakeholders and can set you up well for future career transitions.
Cons
Compensation is below competing strategy consultancies, even after the post-merger adjustment. Specifically, the compensation does not match the workload, which goes hand in hand with the lack of work life balance within the consulting group. This is normal for many strategy consultancies but the compensation should also match. Part of the work-life imbalance comes from lack of experienced Project Managers, e.g. Consultant-level staff. This leads to Consultants and Associate Consultants taking on 2-3 projects sometimes being the PM on multiple engagements at once. While this can be a rewarding experience eventually, it needs to happen over time versus seeing a new-MBA grad forced to "figure it out". The new development model has made the promotion and progression model more rigid (~2 years between title shifts). Some of the rigidity could be chalked up to "growing pains" as senior management gets accustomed to the system. Finally, there should be better alignment and interactions between the SF, NY, and Boston offices with a more congruent culture across sites.
