Pros
- For young professionals, fantastic way to rapidly build a lot of essential skill sets like change management, project management, stakeholder engagement, and communications - Opportunity to connect with wonderful mentors and coaches - Flexibility to "direct" yourself a little more toward the projects/engagements you're interested in - Opportunity to really "own" projects yourself and work directly with clients - Huge variety in types of engagements available (as with all large consulting companies) - Opportunity to request feedback from everyone on your team - and expectation to at least request to your managers at the end of the year! Highly recommend taking advantage of this and getting all the feedback to help you improve - In the public sector, good work life balance for most engagements - you can arrange to work about 40 hrs/week if you delegate effectively
Cons
- You have to track every single hour you work and bill it toward its respective project charge code - every single day - in an online application called Costpoint, which was designed in the depths of hell by a sadistic anti-UX maniac - If you don't log your time by 12pm each day, you get "docked" - this hurts your time compliance rate, which hurts your year-end Evaluation Potential - Your time logged determines your Utilization Rate (UR), a dystopian metric used to evaluate how well you are "utilized by the client" throughout the year. The goal is 90% - which means that you can spend up to 10% on vacation, sick days, or anything that isn't client-related (e.g. mandated Guidehouse-wide yearly trainings, business development work for Guidehouse, Guidehouse things etc.) - Welcome to consulting - you have been assimilated into the collective. Resistance is futile. Now let's just circle back together on that deliverable we were touching base on... - Yes, you do have to worry about your UR - and yes, you're expected to somehow do client work _and_ business development work for Guidehouse - If you go above 90%, this can be viewed as awesome (You're working hard! Hurray wage slavery!) or terrible (Boo, you filthy wage slave) - If you're not getting promoted, you will not get a decent raise or bonus o matter how hard you've killed that project. Inflation will cackle at the size of your puny raise - Some engagements are extremely disorganized, scaling rapidly, and short on manpower - so long, dear work life balance - Terrible onboarding for new hires and little coaching in "how to consultant." Total newbies? Sink or swim