Work - if you are an IT/Digital, Telco specialist and have no interest in real business transformation then this is the place for you! They will sell it to you hard as a proper consultancy but actual, genuine business consultancy assignments are as rare as rainbow unicorn eggs, in other words they don't exist. They will tell you how they can compete with the big boys but this is simply a lie, it is all IT/Digital. There is nothing wrong with this but only join if your area of expertise is technical and telco.
The bench - recently this has started to be managed in a draconian way where consultants are forbidden from seeking consulting leads and generating their own work. Anyone who has worked in any other consultancy will know that this is a bizarre and frankly cretinous way of operating. The only reason this could be happening is to maintain a list of those who could be culled when the time comes because they can be identified as idle/useless. There are legendary tales of people being left on the bench for up to a year through no fault of their own.
Promotion - This is and it has been said before 'an old boys club'. It was set up by a group of Telco friends who only initiate other Telco, white, male clones into the leadership team. There may be one or two ethnics in senior positions but diversity is just wear a BLM t-shirt day or come to an 'exciting' curry evening and that's it. The composition of the leadership team and who gets promoted tells its own story - the facts speak for themselves.
Leadership - there isn't any, the leaders are mostly extremely poor with the best ones having left . Any successes gained over the last few years was comprehensively destroyed by a properly daft agile re-organisation which delivered zilch. A great example of how having a Harvard business qualification doesn't mean you can deliver anything. Last year they received 10s of millions of pounds in investment from their Japanese parent company which is basically the only thing that is propping it up.
Consulting - the small consulting team is is led as though everyone was back in their 6th form with jolly initiatives that are old fashioned and just useless and pointless in generating any extra work and worst still in training junior consultants on anything useful.
Culture - you will have to do some serious smoozing to get into the 'in crowd' which will at least guarantee the best projects and promotions for doing nothing particularly spectacular. Rewards are based on favouritism and if your face fits and if you are prepared to suck up to the disproportionately large number of incompetent directors and leaders.
