"Abandon All Hope Ye Who Work Here" and prepare to begin managing your career to move on
Pros
If you are fresh out of college or new to the job market BE could be a good place for you to get your first experience in their PS Consulting sector. The company is organized into practices that handle lines of business: DoD, Civil, DHS, HUD, HHS, Dept. of Ag, etc. and as such there is great variability between practices. Get into the right practice and all the ills and problems of the company can be a blessing for you in that since they are poorly organized it affords you the possibility to pick your own area to really work hard in and excel and / or to take on additional duties (read longer hours) and even prove your greater value. The BE model allows individuals within a practice to perform their duty skills and at the same time work in and develop skills in other areas. It essentially is not a culture that is so structured that you can have flexibility to move and blossom, lean, and essentially tool yourself into something else or develop a skill set that you might not be afforded to do elsewhere. Haveing that said, there are some project, or billets with certain billing rates that can keep you down and tied to doing the same tasks and functions for years at a time - avoide them and look for the practices where you have flexibility, can work on proposals and learn proposal development, work with the financials and learn about client billing, work with solutions team members and join a group developing out a new solution etc. Above all remember BearingPoint is a stepping stone that should be used by you. Don't even think about a career there, but think about what you can get in, quickly learn, add as experience to tyour resume, and then move on to a position which you wouldn't have been qualified or considered before coming to BearingPoint........ But do it fast for I don't see this company being around much longer. They have mountains of ills, tremendous debt, poor executive managment, and made too many wrong decisions
Cons
1) The company is on its final skids and is heading for bankruptcy as presently organized. No questions about this. 2) As a consequence turn over is very high (read WAY too high) 3) Most of the top talent realized the companies ills long ago and has left. Those left are lower tiered players or people that just don't know how to manage their career. 4) Executive Managment is awful (hence why the mess the company is in) 5) Poor to little training opportunities 6) Internal placement resources are incompetent. If you go on the bench you MUST immediatly find yourself a project to again get billable or you will be terminated (most within 2 weeks these days) and the companies internal HR placement folks are useless in helping you find this. 7) Managing Directors are not in touch with their reports. They do little to manage their billable people, and even less to help those on the bench find work. 8) Bookings are heading south, profitability within PS is up only due to gutting the company of tallent and laying off anyone that comes on the bench. 9) The company can't compete for work that requires solid skill sets, key employees, or cleared personnel because they no longer have a bench to draw from. 10 The stock is worthless and getting worse. The company has over $1B of debt. of which approx. $200 million is "callable" by the creditors within the next few months due to their poor performance and not meeting covenants such as listing on a major stock exchange. Cash on hand is dwindling every day and nothing is going to be left ro keep the company running once the bonds are called. If BearingPoint survives at all it will / must do most if not all of the following: 1) File for chapter 11 and reneig on it's debt. 2) Get rid of it unprofitable sectors and overhead (read employees) 3) See the PS book of business and billable work and billing employees to another company who can take over and manage it better or fold it into their practice and further downsize the overhead of the PS Group.
