Pros
APT is a compelling alternative to traditional consulting (MBB), and exposes its consultants to advanced statistical concepts and data manipulation skills. Quality and range of exit opportunities are pretty comparable to MBB, albeit you won't have the name recognition. If you see yourself leaning more towards a career in the technology industry (PM, data scientist), this place will prepare you far better than traditional consulting. APT has a phenomenal business outlook. When I joined, the company was growing 25% YoY, and still is today. In fact, some of our biggest problems involve having too many things to do for its consultants. The people here are exceptional, and are very open to giving feedback, should you ask for it. The company is not yet a household name within consulting, but has some level of name recognition amongst recruiters, consultants, clients, and classmates. Despite this, APT has excellent business school placements - this year, we have 2 people in our SF office (~45 people) alone going to HBS. In the DC office, I know of several more who are going to Stanford GSB. There is a wide variety of tasks that business consultants are exposed to, including data manipulation, analysis, presentation, and client relationship building. We work with a wide number of industries, spanning traditional retail, CPG, pharmaceuticals, entertainment, technology, restaurants, hotels, finance, etc. The work life balance is generally good, and this is bolstered by a culture of traveling only when necessary. Standing desks, monitors, keyboards, noise cancelling headphones, and more are all provided to consultants to help them be more productive. There is room for international travel, and transfers across roles (e.g. consulting to marketing to product management) or regions (SF to DC to Australia to Taipei) still occur every year.
Cons
APT staffs its consultants across a number of clients. Most consultants here are on at least 5 clients, which means that the work can be very spiky. Compensation is the best in the consulting industry for the entry level, but is quickly outpaced around 2-3 years in. This growth rate will be irrelevant if you only plan on staying 2 years or less. Due to lots of turnover across consulting clients, consultants need to constantly retrain new non-technical employees in the complicated analytics that our software performs. Helping clients figure out which buttons to click is a tremendous exercise in frustration. The work can quickly become repetitive, but that is also due to how effective the software is at mapping a diverse set of problems down to the same problem - test vs. control scientific experimental design and analysis. There is a huge amount of turnover in the SF office, which leads to consultants often being asked to fix things that are poorly documented, without any original context.
