Avanade reviews

Top tier IT services consulting is challenging and not for the faint of heart. It takes absolute dedication and willingness to constantly compete in a stable of thoroughbreds to succeed at this level - especially at Avanade. Experiences will vary over time and across projects and customer cultures but often significant personal sacrifices are required including near constant travel; demanding schedules like nights, weekends, getting up at 4:30 am on Sundays to fly across the country and getting back home at 9 pm or later on Fridays for months on end. I've worked away on the road through more (and at home through major holidays) birthdays and family milestone occasions than I can recount. Also Avanade in my view has become bloated around unnecessary and excessive layers of process, policy and internal oversight organizations seemingly needing to justify their existence through regularly implementing, changing and re-implementing Byzantine layers of reviews, approvals, added costs to customers and hoops to be jumped through leading to an inability to be agile around supporting innovative and new business development pursuits and opportunities. These constantly increasing layers of processes spill over into other areas including performance review and delivery of customer projects. Top technical talent are routinely tapped for opaque internal roles developing assets and technology offerings in isolation and often of questionable real value rather than supporting the business where more needed at the major account and customer level.

Recruiting is terribly misleading toward non-technical hires. I was concerned that my lack of a technical background would put me at a disadvantage working at Avanade and the recruiter told me verbatim "that will not affect your ability to get staffed or promoted, because you're being hired to a role that doesn't require technical knowledge going in. Anything you need to learn they will train you for." So I take the job. Then, there's a complete lack of opportunities for non-technical BA's in my area that don't know SQL. They say..OK, go learn SQL to get stafffed. Their version of 'training': provide me with a SQL review book that ON THE FIRST PAGE actually says "you will need at least 2 years of prior direct experience with SQL in order to be able to pass the MIcrosoft certification exam, THIS BOOK ALONE IS NOT ENOUGH" so....I take the exam twice and don't pass both times. They seem surprised by this even though I show them the book THAT THEY SUGGESTED and how it says that approach would never work. This led to lots of time not being staffed which makes it next to impossible to get promoted. HAd I know this, NEVER would've taken the job.