Disappointed experienced hire in Consulting. Not for everyone, including me. - Anonymous employee Deloitte Employee Review

2.0
Jun 3, 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Great pay and benefits, prestigious name, and mostly nice people. Lots of opportunities if you are fresh out of business school or an experienced management consultant in a main stream business line.

Cons

Highly matrixed organization makes it difficult to figure out who to talk to about particular issues. The firm is big on networking, yet it is very difficult to find people who work on projects or for clients you are interested in because of the highly matrixed nature of the firm. You can use Deloitte People Network (an internal version of LinkedIn) to identify people with similar interests, but not everyone keeps their profiles up and many tend to keep project and client details generic, which makes it difficult to target networking efforts. On day one, I was shocked to learn that it was on me to find work within the firm and that my ability to get staffed on a project was largely dependent on how successfully I networked. Since networking is a lot of work for me and I prefer to use my energy doing the job rather than politicking, this was not welcomed news. Although they assign you a resource manager, a counselor (your rating official), and an on-boarding buddy, you are really on your own to figure most things out. Everybody has a full-time job and they don't have a lot of time to help you navigate the new landscape. Also, they may not have any understanding of why you were hired or your areas of interest and that makes it difficult for them to empathize with your situation. No room for even the smallest mistake. The brand and the premium charged for services depends on perfection and they beat that into you as you on-board. The problem is that humans are fallible and you can't be perfect all the time. The overwhelming emphasis on perfection the first time you do something has made me hesitant to try new assignments. And, because I'm highly specialized in an area outside of the mainstream Consulting business lines, I'm extremely limited on where I can add value. One reason I joined Deloitte Consulting was to learn new things and experience new work areas. However, tight timeliness on seemingly every task makes it difficult for you to learn how to do new things and most of the training I've received so far has not been sufficient for me to actually master the task. They dump a lot of training on you when you first on-board and you won't have a chance to use much of it for a while, if ever. You'll check the box and stay busy your first several weeks, but you won't retain much of what you learn and that will make you feel like you wasted your time. Some training is really not training at all. It's designed to see if they can break you down by putting you in impossible situations and see how you respond. They'll give you a task that would take someone who knows what they are doing weeks to accomplish and they'll ask you to do it in 30 mins. Then they'll change the rules and give you 10 minutes. The only thing that did for me was shake my confidence and resent the process. Extensive use of "consultant speak" makes it difficult to understand what people are saying if you don't know the language. This makes it even more difficult to integrate with the firm. When you ask for help from internal service units, people frequently tell you to contact someone else and they use a generic title that you have no way of knowing who that is because there is no directory or functional structure. It often takes me 3 or 4 emails to identify the person I need to talk with to resolve an issue.

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Pros

Great people to work with

Cons

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5.0
Aug 4, 2014
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Pros

These folks know exactly what they are doing. They set high standards, and consistently deliver. Their project expectations and planning is excellent. The top level management folks are extremely smart and have a great sense of vision and planning. If you go to company social events (which are very frequent by the way), it is quite easy to have conversations with upper management people (Partners). Deloitte's hiring pattern is very consistent. For the young starters, they hire smart, well spoken, and subtly aggressive candidates. They have excellent training and knowledge management. They have a well oiled and empowered HR and Tech Support group. Things get done pretty fast. Their paid time off program is really great, and pretty straight forward. No messing about. They have a big social responsibility program that encourages volunteering. It also presents a great opportunity for youngsters to take event organizing responsibilities. This can be very very useful. Once, I volunteered for an event where we painted rooms for an orphanage center. There was a young guy who did the organizing. We were 10-12 people, with 3 senior executives actually doing paintwork. Quite unique. I have personally seen that Deloitte's top talents tend to start young, spend a 3-4 years, then take a hiatus to pursue a Graduate Degree (typically an MBA). The firm sometimes re-hires these consultants after their MBA with generous financial incentives. They offer much better packages to folks graduating from top universities. Sometimes they can offer huge joining bonuses. I worked in the IT consulting division.They tend to get top-end projects. On projects, the average age seems pretty low. A lot of 20-somethings, then there are a handful of 30-40 year old people and some senior Management folks. Beginner salaries can be a bit low. (which is expected. It takes some time to build credibility in the Consulting business) Overall, a great place to start your professional career. If you pay attention, you will get seasoned very quickly.

Cons

Work-life balance can become poor, especially during tight project timelines (This is expected in the Consulting Business). The employees have a significant amount of "firm-internal" training and knowledge contribution tasks. There are annual goal expectations. It can get tedious if you continuously work on high demand projects. There is intense competition, especially during targeted promotion/milestone years. There can be some backstabbing. It's part of the experience. It is not as bad as it sounds, and seems manageable. A lot of times, being young and inexperienced has it's flaws. The company has a simple way of seasoning consultants. They get pushed into high pressure situations, and they learn fast, and quickly start managing their own work. But they tend to be blind towards intricate details, especially in complicated IT product implementations. This has an interesting effect. If someone is able to do the hands-on work, everyone else tries to piggy-back on that person for their actual work. The hands-on guy gets overwhelmed, and others try to use him/her as a key resource. -- I personally went through a crunch project, and found a number of people "managing expectations" (piggy backing), while a handful of people actually knew the end-to-end solution and did the hands-on work. This created a lot more work and mental anguish than needed. Because of the expressed pressure, the hands-on guys have a hard time building and growing their reputation and subsequent performance evaluation rating. This also affects the project execution timelines. IMPORTANT: Make sure you thoroughly read through your employment agreement and understand the implications. In recent years, they have started hiring for specific projects ONLY. This falls under a particular "AMS service line". In this case, if your assigned project gets into a problem, you are exposed to the risk of employment termination. Their HR and Management are very helpful, and they will try to get you a new project. But there are several constraints like location, your skills, and limited time. I went through this, and it was somewhat unnerving. This was one of the reasons I ended up leaving the company.

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