Pros
- Exposure to a middle market and blue chip clients - Possibility to know and work for the middle managers of the aforementioned companies - Extremely young environment: you'll know a lot of young collegues of your age with whom you may forge lifelong friendships - 99% automatic promotion at the year-end review, even if your work generally sucks: the company promotes anyone because it needs to sell "senior" consultants, for whom customers are willing to pay more - 15€ per diem if you are required to stay at an hotel for the night (e.g. you are at least 100km from the office you were hired for and the manager is gracious enough to let you book an hotel room for the night) - In the Management Consulting service line, you learn to use the basic consulting tools (Excel and PowerPoint)...
Cons
- ...and not much else (no Access, SAS, R...except for specific service lines - e.g. Financial Risk Management) - The quality of the projects varies considerably. For a lot of projects your work may be to prepare PowerPoint slides which simply summarizes already available client's documentation (for management presentations) with zero added value. Contrary to general belief, interesting activities aren't the norm. It doesnt' get any sexier than aligning the balloons in the slide and changing the colors to the same Gantt chart for the n-th time - Depending on the manager, you may be required to travel insane hours to go to the customer headquarter (like 5 hours a day round trip every day because the manager does not want to book you an hotel room to save on his contracts expenses) - Low rotation among clients: you may be stuck with working for the same customer for (even 3-4) years, thus becoming more of a client employee than an external consultant - Long working hours in the financial services advisory groups (the typical week will vary according to the service line and kind of project, but I've personally cloked 100+ working hours weeks) - Half of that time will be passed on preparing over and over again the same PowerPoint slides because some senior/manager/associate partner/etc. changed his mind (not once, not twice, but several times) compared to what she told you to do just a the day before. The other hal of the time will be spent preparing slides which will be discarded and never shown to the customer - Expected to be always available (nights, weekends and holidays included) - I've been called by a manager past midnight (!) and I've received e-mail with work to do at nearly 2 a.m. For a period, I even had scheduled meeting with the manager every Sunday at 9. a.m. for no reason whatsoever. The worst was being required to work a saturday night/monday morning at half past 4 a.m. just as I was back from the disco - again for no real urgency - No paid overtime (obviously) - Low salary compared to similar entry level position you can find in medium and big corporate (and for far less hours) - Very limited salary increase year over year - Laughable year-end bonuses, except for the corporate finance division (where the bonus is computed according to the deal value of the projects followed - generally M&A projects) - Contrary to general belief, not very meritocratic, at least in my experience (everyone and their mother can rise to the rank as long as she's willing to slave for the company). This fact can also be considered a positive element, as there's far less peer competition for promotion compared to other consulting companies - As a consequence of the previous point, you'll notice a lot of unprepared (sometimes bordering on the ridiculous) managers and senior managers who lack deep knowledge of their industry but made it nearly to the top thanks to being "yes" men and women with workaholic instincts and masochistic tastes - Extremely difficult to be transferred to another division of the company if you realize you may want to specialize in a different field from what you where hired for - Not really great exit opportunities - at least compared to a few years ago. You won't become a C-level executive at a blue chip company because you worked in KPMG. Seriously, get over with the dream the company's recruiters tells you. Depending on the division ("Line of Service" or LOS) you work in, it may be extremely difficult to find a decent job as soon as you decide that you've had enough of the company. Prepare your exit considering at least 6 months of job - searching (of course it depends on a case by case basis - I've known collogues who found a new job in just 2 months, but I'd say the're teh exception, not the rule)