Might not recommend the assistant role, except to those who need great healthcare
Pros
- amazing healthcare benefits (NO insurance premiums, also extremely low copays, unlimited sick days). - you can bill a lot of OT, and managers haven't been pushing back on hours of OT billed since covid. - extreme feedback environment. You will learn a lot but you need to have a thick skin and a flexible ego. - admin team recently introduced a year-end process where managers collect downward feedback from their reports. - overall positive culture. - BCG does fascinating work for its clients (although as an assistant it can be hard to "dive into" the work and understand content, take on "stretch opportunities" and such due to their own lack of capacity plus lack of trust from executives). - current remote model means assistants can join more case team events (previously held for consultants only at offsites). - good name/experience to have on your resume.
Cons
- Boston office specifically uses a "new" (past several years) evaluation model for assistants, that is separate from how other business support teams are eval'ed. Most assistants in this office dislike the model due to extreme ambiguity and lack of transparency around pay/promotion structure and feedback-collection burden, but admin management seems either ignorant (very unlikely), uninterested, or vehemently opposed to this. This model is also spreading to other offices... - despite great benefits and OT, assistant comp isn't competitive with other industries and firms due to base salary. You can make way more money (think +$30K) being an assistant at a biotech or finance/VC firm in the Boston area. - very high volume of work for assistants, before and especially since covid. Managers encourage assistants to "push back" on unnecessary requests, set boundaries with the people they support, and step away after normal business hours, but fundamental problem of assistants being overloaded with scheduling persists with no solution in sight. Stemming from this, assistants may experience high levels of stress and long working hours. - less senior assistants tend to be "team players" more than senior assistants, being more willing to cover other assistants and contribute to team events and culture. - assistants are responsible for alerting their coverage when they're sick (vs. managers coordinating), and for securing their coverage for vacations. - very limited internal mobility for business support staff (ex. admins, finance, HR) partly due to perpetual competition with internal consulting-track staff. - sharp cultural divide between business support and consulting staff. Consultant evals are much more meritocratic and they get more clarity around progress tracking and promotions, consultants are paid way more money, they have dramatically higher budgets for team events, are the unsaid focus when BCG talks about retention and improving D&I, etc. Won't lie, after a while this really stings.
