Accenture Employee Review

Current Employee – been working at Accenture

Pros – - Continuous business training (St. Charles)
- You get about 1 week of training per year at St. Charles (more / less)
- We are amazing at project management...seriously laugh all you want...we are really good at it
- The promotion process is less ambiguous than other consulting firms
- The size and complexity of projects lets you learn a lot about how to communicate your ideas
- The company is very social which makes me feel young
- The ability to work on multiple projects means that I am able to learn a lot of different things...basically...what I learned on one project can be tested on another project to see if the idea is a legitimate idea
- The top quality names means that you will sometimes work with amazing people
- The people in my C3 school (senior consultant at other firms) all had found the time to work on international projects....hence working international is really possible if you're interested

Cons – - We are getting very large, hence some of the annual gatherings that we used to do (which were amazing for building cross city support) no longer occur
- Getting vendor training is difficult as the building the business case is more difficult
- We used to hire well rounded individuals - which means that they could work on several different types of projects. Now we hire specialized people - which means that they can only be used in one area - unfortunately leadership does not understand that you cannot take a (i.e.) Java person and make them into a Tester and expect them to be happy...basically we are having problems balancing our skills requirements
- Since we make more money by putting more people in seats - the standard for getting into Accenture has dropped - that means that a lot of the people that join Accenture now are from 3rd and 4th tier schools
- Accenture's "bread and butter" is project management - we have a special way of doing it that works. Unfortunately our new hires are thrown on projects before they are ready...so instead of having projects managed using the Accenture way to project management you get the Joe-Billy-Bob method to project management
- In this rush to grow - we've lost our pyramid...which means that managers that used to have consultants to help manage large teams now have to do it all by themselves. That means that our managers are stretched thin

Advice to Senior Management – Pay more money - Deloitte and Booz Allen pay more...and yes..I know that a difference is expected...but seriously 20-30% differences means that Accenture's not in the same ball park

Identify your top tier players...I don't meant he people that ladder AT THE VERY TOP or SIG ABOVE...Those guys are great - but go ahead and identify the SMEs in each group...make sure they are rewarded. Because honestly - the more SMEs that we lose - the harder it is for me because I don't have the support structure required to get my tech question answered quickly or to have my projects QA'd --> which in the long run means that more of my projects will fail --> which means we'll have to pay more $$$ to fix the problems

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend