Pros
APT has an amazing flat hierarchy culture that makes it very easy to solve problems with all of your colleagues, from senior vice presidents to your direct managers and other consultant peers. This culture, combined with top-notch recruiting, makes the people at APT the best combination of intelligent, driven, and kind people. There is no "partner" or "up or out" culture that leads to backstabbing or hyper-competitiveness with peers. Your truly feel like a great team and family, even at such a large size. The role itself, at its best, is an amazing opportunity to work on challenging analytics problems across several industries in a very short period of time. In a little over a year I worked in 6 different industries. Brainstorming the correct approach to answering a business question in a scientific manner is thrilling, and being such a data-driven company makes the work feel meaty, substantial, and valuable. The travel is also just the right amount: 1-2 days every month, enough to keep things fresh but not enough to become tiring. APT also has a "make it happen" attitude that makes it easy for anyone to start ANYTHING that seems even somewhat relevant to the firm and that they are passionate about. This is in addition to the excellent volunteering policy. Prove value and these can develop into company efforts with allocation, hundreds of interested teammates, and possibly even a new department within the company. This type of freedom is rare if not completely non-existent at any other company. The company invests a lot of in mentoring junior colleagues. You can grow very quickly as a new college grad, and within less than 2 years become a team manager and receive responsibilities that are unheard of at other firms. The benefits and fun, youthful culture makes the firm almost magical. Free catered meals every day, working from home or remotely every few days a month, taking vacations whenever you want no-questions-asked, excellent social activities, game rooms, fun social groups, a lot of snacks, and lots of office perks makes it all seem like the perfect package. The above those are rational reasons for why APT is an outstanding place to work, but it is a subjective evaluation that really brings it all together: there was not one day I spent at this company where I did not laugh, smile, feel good, and enjoy my time.
Cons
While APT is a great place to work and has a lot of guidance and support for new hires, the "guard rails" on career development can be stifling for someone who comes in with experience or an advanced degree. Everyone starts at the same level, and the junior responsibilities are underwhelming for someone not immediately out of an undergrad degree. Because everyone starts at the same level, the pay - which is great for an undergrad - can be lower than other options (e.g. better than a McKinsey analyst, but worse than an associate). The big differentiator seems to be whether one gets promoted six months before the rest of one's class, which is not a great deal if one is bringing years of experience to the table at the start. Related to above, the fast promotions also can make your managers be truly junior and - in spite of a lot of training - relatively bad at management. As a more senior hire, I felt like I could do a better job at management than some of my managers, and after about a year I felt like I had surpassed my managers in competence in soft, technical, and managerial skills. While the BC role can be riveting in analytical thought partnership and problem-solving, it also can have some pretty mundane elements. Certain tasks can feel mundane either by their nature (e.g. password resets for a client user of the software) or due to poor execution (e.g. a client training can be a great opportunity for conceptual thinking, but sometimes it can devolve into a clicking tutorial). The company invested tremendously in tools like APT Academy to shave off these boring elements, but a part is still there. The staffing model where you work on multiple clients at a time can make workload unpredictable. The average is likely 55 hours per week, but there is a 15 hour variance both above and below this point. At its worst, when all your teams are on fire the job can have a month or more of 70 hour weeks. Supposedly the staffing system is there to let your advisor respond to such situations, but I have never seen or heard of intervention here. Ultimately, success involves being defensive of one's time, "under-promising and over-delivering", and having a pessimistic outlook about your bandwidth in the future. This makes it difficult to be ambitious and shoot for doing your best work, because you are never sure when you will get blindsided. Sadly, "going 80-20" on things becomes a dominant culture, which usually means less investment up front that creates a maintenance mess down the line.