Terrible supervisors, micro-managers, bullies. Lack of career support and mentoring for consultants. If you are a consultant you are treated like a second-class citizen. Staff will not invite you to meetings even if you are leading the project, they will try to remove you from the field missions that you are organizing, and if you manage to go or attend the meeting they will prevent you from speaking. Consultant women are given the secretary jobs, not considered or even given the opportunity to write the policy papers, those are usually given to men even if they just finish university and you have a master degree and experience in the field, they think you have the job just for fun and not to get bored like when women joined the labor force in 1950s. There are very limited opportunities to transition into staff, if you get a clearance after you had a successful panel, they will ignore it or even go out of their way to change the track of a new staff opening to force you to go through a panel again and avoid hiring you, a total waste of time. If you are not using the clearance system just get rid of it, stop pretending. Supervisors will pretend to speak highly of his/her team but in reality just want to keep you in the dark, so that he/she can be in charge of the really important stuff. They make you sign in a timesheet every month but you can only record 8 hours per day, so even if you overworked a week to get the project done you can only record 8 hours. Its rediculous and a total waste of time.