The best consulting gig for college grads
Pros
I love it here. The work is widely varied across industries and skillsets but almost always challenging and complex. I've gained more exposure in three years than I would have in ten years positioned at an industry job. We have a strong tradition of giving new consultants way more responsibility than they're qualified for, and most of us rise to those expectations and grow rapidly as a result. I am already considered the "WMP expert" for a particular type of project and I don't think many college graduates can claim that after just three years. This was not a result of my hard work or ingenuity; WMP provided the opportunity and I simply rose to meet it. In addition to providing such opportunities, WMP also puts you alongside some of the brightest consultants that I've encountered and there's a strong sense of team work and collaboration. I've heard horror stories from other companies whereby experienced employees will safeguard and hoard their knowledge because they don't want newhires easily learning what took them years to figure out. I have literally never heard of this kind of thing occurring at WMP; knowledge is constantly being shared via training sessions, blog posts, lunch'n'learns, coach/career advisor relationships, our intranet site, team meetings, I could go on and on. If you learn something cool and want to disseminate it to the rest of the company, it is very much encouraged and there are multiple outlets to do so. Coming out of college, this place is especially great. You start with a big class of newhires aka your "start class." Our start class this year was 59 kids and it grows significantly every year. These annual waves of start classes have a few benefits: 1. You start a full week of training alongside 60+ new friends. Start classes are always a tight knit group, even as the years progress. If you don't imagine yourself socializing with co-workers outside of work, then you won't like it here. Outlook and Lync are used for coordinating dinners and happy hours just as often as client status meetings. 2. The company culture stays young. When an office of ~400 brings in such a big start class, it's a big injection of college culture. Our office keg is replaced on a weekly basis at this point. 3. When a big flood of new consultants come in, it pushes everyone up the career model. With the consultant roles being filled by new hires, almost all of our hires from the previous start class are promoted to Experienced Consultant. Raises and promotions are constant here and it's largely due to the big influx of college graduates every year. This is consulting, so it's not a 9-5 job, but the work/life balance here is pretty legit. Over the last 15 months I worked an average of 47.8 hours per week INCLUDING all travel time (taxis/planes/cars/etc) so it's probably about 42 hours per week of work on average. I've traveled about 30% of the time here and that's been perfect for me. You start with four weeks of time off and I've never been denied a PTO request even when it was during critical parts of my project. Our work from home policy is that we have no policy, you can work from home whenever you need to (even if you're simply hungover). I consider myself pretty fortunate, though. I have friends in my start class who travel more and work significantly more hours than I do. But when you enjoy the work that you're doing and the people that you're with, the long hours aren't so terrible.
Cons
WMP consistently underpays its consultants. I've always made between $5-$10k less than I thought I was worth. The new ESOP program and the annual bonus help close that gap, but I still feel that I'm not being adequately compensated. We demand the "best and brightest" and we pay for the "good enough." I've looked at other consulting gigs which have offered me significantly more money, but at the end of the day I would have to sacrifice too much company culture and work/life balance to make it worth it. The happiness that I get from this job is worth more than the $15-$20k extra I could get elsewhere. This is more nitpicky, but we use a performance management tool and force everyone to create goals for themselves at the beginning of each year AND at the beginning of each project and then write reviews of those goals at then end of each year/project. I can appreciate the need for setting goals and reviewing performance as it relates to those goals, but the tool we use (Halogen) is extremely cumbersome and is universally hated by all Consultants. You don't have to write goals or reviews very often, but when you do, you will hate your life.