A few pros if you want to chill and are unambitious, but staying here too long will hurt your career.
Pros
• Shorter hours than industry average • People are nice enough (though you should still expect a stiff upper lip from an extremely British culture and corporate mentality) • Managers are approachable and will give you space to own your work, early responsibility, and let you set your style of work • Flatter hierarchy than industry average
Cons
Projects: PA is near the bottom of the barrel for client projects. Don’t believe the marketing mentioned in interviews. Most projects here are long term UK gov jobs doing menial work like project management… Or worse. A few cliques sell truly innovative work (concentrated Strategy and Sustainability), but they are hard to break into due to a strong quid pro quo culture and broken resourcing system. Compensation: Compensation is below market average. They pay alright to recruit, but pay rises are meagre as you go up the ranks. Bonuses are laughable and even insulting: in some teams, a first-year analyst with good performance may not even get a 4-figure bonus. I don’t know anyone who came close to the “illustrative bonus” quoted on their offer letter. Recognition/Evaluation: Employees are almost entirely measured on their utilisation (% of client-billable days vs. total days worked). Business development work, thought leadership, training your peers and other internal work are pretty much not recognized in performance evaluation. If your utilisation is sub-target then you’re in trouble, regardless of how much value you brought to the firm through other work. The dogma is that 100% utilisation is a dream to aspire to, even though this means staying on the same government project for a year doing mindless PMO. Those with high ute are worshipped and glorified, whilst those doing real consulting work (short fast-paced projects with gaps) are shunned and treated as second class employees… ironic. PA rewards employees who don’t leave their comfort zone. Those who try to develop themselves professionally by pivoting their specialties or leading internal initiatives are punished for the reduced utilisation that naturally ensues. Project resourcing / staffing: This is the worst part of PA. There is a formal resourcing system for projects, but it’s not used at all. Instead of going to resource managers, partners fill up their projects informally with their buddies. This creates a gigantic mismatch between skills and projects, with people doing projects they’re completely unqualified for while a perfect fit sits on the bench. People clamour to get coffees in with partners, work off-fees and do everything they can for a bit of exposure. We’re told to “build our personal brand” and become known for our specialty, but it’s hard to do that when opportunities to shine are so limited based on network. Culture: PA culture is extremely British. These guys take saying one thing and meaning another to a whole new level. Mentality is mostly unambitious and you will not be rewarded for being driven. Diverse experiences and thinking differently are not valued; if you’re not British, you will not have a good time here. Diversity: Diversity is extremely poor, even in the lower ranks, so I’ll let you guess what senior levels are like. Minorities are promoted slower and it’s painfully obvious. There are initiatives like BAME, Pride, WIT etc, but PA is still very far behind, in particular on BAME backgrounds. The problem is hard to fix as it stems from an insidious culture of groupthink and (sometimes actively) discouraging other perspectives. Strategy: PA’s market positioning is excellent for milking the gullible cash cows that are its UK public sector clients, but its near-unilateral focus on UK gov is questionable in the context of the CEO’s vision to be “the Harvard of Consulting”. Here’s why: 1. Long-term programme management jobs (no, PMO is not consulting) result in an unskilled workforce with little actual understanding of business. I never thought I would need to explain the principles of supply and demand to a “consultant”, but here we are. 2. Lack of internationalism entrenches the strong British culture and stifles opportunity for out-of-the-box thinking. 3. It attracts a very specific type of people, including many former civil servants. This brings an almost civil-service-like culture to some parts of the firm… Which is nearly opposite to the diverse and “challenge everything” way of thinking that consulting firms like to tout. It also doesn’t take a genius to know you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. Recently PA has increased North America which is good, but they’ve simultaneously been closing many offices outside Europe and North America… Including in emerging markets. Go figure. People: People here are nice enough, but if you’re ambitious and want to be surrounded by people who are too, this isn’t the place for you. You’ll find a few gems, but they leave very fast. For the most part, people are unimpressive and remarkably unknowledgeable about the fields they are supposedly experts in, and I felt myself getting dumber here while watching my peers in other consulting firms get real experience.
