Boston Consulting Group reviews

The experience is highly variable depending on which location and in which practice area (industry). In the end, it is a people business and the caliber of partners that lead certain practice areas can have a big impact on your overall experience - including your learning, the quality of the cases you get put on and also your work life balance. For example, the consumer goods practice in greater china has terrific leadership and if you can align yourself to work on those projects, that means you will get to work with strong leaders, will be in an environment where work-life balance is respected, projects are well scoped and so on. This is not always true for all parts of BCG and there are those who have had to work unnecessarily long hours because a project was not well defined from the start. The staffing process is not always transparent - establishing your own reputation within the firm quickly is important to the quality of your experience during your time there. Like any other people business, there is an official staffing process for projects but, in the end, if the senior partners respect you and wants you on their projects, that is what really makes the difference. I think BCG in greater china in general can do a better job in treat consultants and associates with the level of respect that is standard in other parts of the world.

Stress - it is a constant high stress environment where many employees often have detrimental physical and mental effects Lack of empathy - the system and people who matter are not always sensitive to what employees (especially junior and mid levels) are going through mentally because of the high stress environment Subjectivity in evaluation - while there is a formal performance evaluation process, it is often dependent on how many and how influential mentors / advocates one has in the system. The same performance could result in very different outcomes with two different sets of advocates. Surprises are far too many to employees - where people can go from being rockstars to struggling to keep their job in no time. Hit or miss for young associates / sr. associates - you need to get lucky to work with a good set of people on a reasonably good case in your first six months. If not, it can be very difficult for new people to find their feet and last beyond the initial 2 years.