Extensive Travel
As with all consulting firms, you can expect to be on the road Monday to Thursday. This means living out of a suitcase and eating hotel food during the work week, as well as being away from friends & family back home. It also means that if you try to take a trip somewhere on a weekend, you will likely be away from home for about two weeks straight. This lifestyle is exceedingly hard to maintain, as you still have to accomplish all that's required in your personal life (doctor's / dentist appointments, grocery shopping, laundry, etc.) in the a very abridged timeframe (many places aren't open on weekends or Sunday, and you still have to work all day Friday).
Inflexibility
"Flexibility" is a term that is typically used by engagement leadership when asking staff to adjust or cancel their previous plans in favor of what they determine is more important. This means last minute cancellations of vacations (or working remotely from vacation), abridged visits to family, etc. The firm also pays for your phone. While this sounds great, it really means you are on call 24/7.
Lack of Ownership
In my experience, I have typically learned about my next project (including the team, the client, the location, the leadership, and the role) the Friday afternoon / evening before an expected early Monday morning flight to the client site. While the recruiters tout the ability to cave out your own career, in terms of pursuing your interests and passions within the firm, this is significantly more difficult to achieve than promised.
Management Style
The senior leadership of the firm comes almost exclusively from the audit practice, and many of the senior leaders within the consulting practice came over from audit as well (as we are rapidly building back up our consulting business after selling it to IBM years ago). The approach to managing an audit business should be very different than the approach to managing a consulting business. Audit clients are bound by law to receive your (or a competitor's) service and services to a single client can go on for 10 years without much additional effort. In consulting, each client has to be effectively persuaded of the value and contribution of each project you attempt to sell. While the busy season for auditors can mean extensive hours, consultants typically see this at least once per engagement (avg length ~4 months). Finally, auditing is a very top-down business with fairly defined / rigid rules in place, far greater consistency in terms of teammates, and far less frequent / consistent travel. Consulting is a profession that is typically seen as a place for a meritocracy of ideas, where you attempt to intelligently solve new and complex problems. The hierarchal approach taking in auditing is simply at odds with the needs of a consulting business.
Inconsistency
Every new project comes with a new team and new leadership. These project / engagement leaders typically have vastly different approaches, in both style and expectations. Some engagement leaders give a lot of ownership and respect to their team, while MANY treat their team like traveling admins and give little respect for their time. With this constant churn related to project staffing, you are also have to "prove yourself" with each new engagement and start from scratch. This makes it exceedingly difficult to build a career, as you are constantly starting over. Combine all of this with a generally blind process for project placement and extensive travel / time away from home, and you have a recipe for extreme stress and burnout in your employees.
Lack of Upward Feedback
The firm rolled out a new performance review system that streamlined the process for rating its employees. At the same time, it also removed the upward feedback mechanism. This is a very concerning development. Since we jump from project to project so frequently, we also change leadership nearly as frequently. In a typical company, there is an inherent incentive to develop and treat your staff well because the better they perform, the better your life is in the long run. With consulting, there is no long run since projects typically only last 4 months. Without an upward feedback loop incorporated into a manager / leader's own performance review, there is little incentive to take the concerns of their team seriously. This becomes increasingly clear as you work with more and more members of middle management (above junior staff and below partner).
Leadership
Promotions to leadership positions are largely based on politicking / perception from above, being in the right place at the right time / sticking around long enough, and technical competency. Notice how I never mentioned demonstrated leadership or even leadership potential. That is because within most professional services firms, the ability to get the job done is all that is witnessed from those above and not how the job is done or how it impacts the people below. With relatively short duration assignments and, consequently, relationships with team members, coupled with the lack of upward feedback, this creates a very weak incentive to develop your team or treat them particularly well. Yet this same incentive structure is used for determining advancement within the firm. The overall impact of such a poor system can be seen on new hires after they have been with the firm between 6 months and 1 year, and is a significant driver of the high turnover rate in recent years. The day-to-day experience and overall quality of life for most consultants is almost entirely driven by the quality of their engagement management team. With such a poor way of determining engagement management, and the lack of a feedback loop to accurately rate said management from the perspective of those they are managing, you have no way to improve the system or course correct individuals that have already advanced. This is a recipe for either driving away talent or forging them into the same quality of management already in place.
