Slalom reviews

The initial problem with this model is that it only really works when everyone is billing out 100% of their time and when the firm is willing to sign up for "any" type of work in exchange for adding staff to projects. This forces a flat organization within Slalom where there is some variance in rates and experience but minimal strategic work or opportunities for true career advancement. This is unlike the Big4 model which creates the opportunity for staff to grow at the expense of their aging business model. The side effect of this model at Slalom is that staff can oftentimes be aligned to projects that don't match their core skill set and, due to the flat nature of the organization, they will rarely have a manager/senior leader go to bat for them if they are unhappy with their project or drifting in their career. The only real way to get promoted and build a career is to find an entirely new client for Slalom and build an account from the ground up, which would provide Slalom with a new, ongoing revenue stream associated to you. This is certainly not impossible - and several junior Slalomers have climbed that chain - but rest assured that it's a huge dice roll. When you're spending 8 hours/day with a different client, doing staff aug work and then being asked to participate in seeming endless culture-building exercises for Slalom (happy hours), it becomes very difficult to gel into a true consulting role and proactively find new clients/work. Because Slalom is comprised of younger staff who have yet to develop the full range of management and consulting experience, most of Slalom's projects involve day-to-day services, like developing Tableau reports, testing, documenting requirements, taking meeting notes, etc. Did I mention testing? Further, projects typically only grow when clients proactively ask for additional staff vs. Slalom pitching new strategic services (like what you'd see with the Big4). Again, this is not a problem for Slalom because they are ok with staff leaving after a few years of their boring work because - in the next year - there will be new graduating college class with fresher technical skills who are ready to do technical work for 50-60 hours/week while only billing 40. The biggest problem that I - and many other people - have with Slalom is that it's not honest to its employees about what the company actually is - at all stages of recruitment and employment. They have armies of recruiters and a large social media presence to show future employees how much "fun" it is to work for the company. They beg employees to submit surveys to get the firm on "Top 100" lists for consulting publications and to provide online feedback on social sites so that they can provide hard statistics to further recruit young talent. But the benefit of using college grads/younger staff in this capacity is that they're new to their careers so they really don't have any baseline to compare their Slalom experience to. So, they stay until they realize that having an in-office keg does not truly provide that career-ROI they are looking for. Welcome to Slalom: the post college Frat.

Here comes the issue for most people at the firm. I was promised that I will be engaged in Management/Technology Consulting projects..... However, 85-90% of the jobs were staff augmentation where the consultants are glorified PM and BA's that triaged failed internal IT projects locally. For those that have worked on high-value added projects in their previous life will walk away disappointed and most people wouldn't find out about this until they on-boarded a project. My first project was fielding support tickets for the IT department. Majority of the consultants that I talked to had the same complaints and not a single person seemed to be satisfied. Every discussion I had were discouraging. The so-called CSL's (who nobody at the firm really knows how they add value) will lie and sell you on projects to ensure that their accounts will remain happy. Their model is to become a "value-add staff aug" and eventually get to other internal projects for clients by delivering existing projects. So that leaves majority of the consultants to do the grunt work and have them talk their way up the chain by themselves - not a great strategy and I rather just work for the client in that case (which is happening more often than not). In addition most companies will go with a higher tier consulting firms that can provide them with a whole solution, not to fill gaps like Slalom does with Staff aug. The company does have expertise in certain areas, but that's if you join the national team which has a very similar model as the Big 4 where you will be traveling to certain clients. If you're local, you have no choice but to be stuck on Staff Aug projects. Lastly, they pride themselves as a "flat" structure and everyone is at the same level. Horrible idea. No structure for people means no career progression and any ambitious consultant will not like that. They did start creating structure as I was leaving but most promotions were based on who you knew in the office and not based on skill level. I think this is done on purpose, but as you get larger as an organization its an necessary evil. Probably something to work on. All in all - Slalom is a great Staff Aug firm, but I wish they didn't lie to themselves and gave employees empty promises of exciting projects in the pipeline. Be real about it, you measure yourself on run rate, not the quality of the projects which is the business model and I am 100% okay with that if the transparency is there. I hated being lied to and it happened right in front of my face by many of the CSL's. Overall, it was a tough decision to leave because the office culture was great, some of the leadership were respectable, but at the end of the day, I couldn't deal with the lack of career progression, constant complaints, and uninteresting staff aug projects. I don't think it would have been as big of an issue for me if this was transparent to begin with, but no one's going to join the firm if they knew what they were getting themselves into. So I'm not entirely surprised. Oh yea, and the benefits are horrific.