Pros
• Brand Name: Having Deloitte on your CV provides will open doors (despite the disconnect between the firm’s external reputation and the reality of working there) • Predictable Promotion: At junior levels, career progression is almost a given. You have to really mess up to miss out on promotion. • Platform provision: All employees have access to an enterprise subscription to Udemy for upskilling and the FT subscription was a welcome perk.
Cons
• Isolating Culture: While "hybrid" is the policy, the reality in AI & Data was almost entirely remote. The firm’s official guidance is to be present for the “moments that matter” but this is almost invariably interpreted by project leaders to mean entirely remote. This made it difficult to learn from senior colleagues or build a network, leading to difficulty in upskilling and limited visibility for new project opportunities. • Flawed Incentive Structure: Bonuses were negligible, which actively disincentivised high performance. In my analyst cohort, those working late nights received the same recognition and progression as those who stayed on the bench or finished strictly at 5 PM. It is not possible to fast-track promotion by working harder than or outperforming your peers. Hard work felt like an unrewarded donation of time. • Stagnant Work Streams: A strategic pivot toward offshore delivery centers (India, Egypt, Eastern Europe) has hollowed out technical roles for UK-based juniors. New starters are often relegated to non-technical Project Management or Business Analyst roles, leading to a high attrition rate for those wanting to develop hands-on technical skills. • Lack of technical opportunities for junior staff: Many project teams were reluctant to entrust technical roles to unproven junior staff members, which is compounded by the lack of in-person development culture. Additionally, the firm’s strategy has shifted many technical roles to offshore delivery centres in India, Egypt and Eastern Europe, leaving new starters to non-technical project management or business analyst roles. From my cohort, most people who wanted to develop their technical skillset left within two years. • Poor Personal Etiquette: The culture often feels transactional. It was common to receive urgent demands from senior staff who didn't know me, often misspelling my name and skipping introductions, with no follow-up or gratitude once the task was completed. I get the impression that the firm is so big that people don’t feel accountable for poor manners and people are reduced to Microsoft Teams profiles due to the impersonal working culture. • Side of desk work: Contributions to Firm Development through PD and BD don’t feel valued in performance reviews. During recent redundancies, "Client Billability" was the only survival metric that mattered. Senior colleagues often leverage juniors for their own PD projects with vague promises of opportunities that rarely materialise. • Broken Internal Networking (The Bench): Whilst at the firm, there was regularly a big bench. Historically, networking has been encouraged to find projects. However, my difficulties in building a network forced me to use the central resourcing system to find projects. Central Resourcing consists of impersonal, camera-off Teams calls that feel like throwing information into a void. I eventually stopped attending these calls as attendance didn’t seem to be tracked and they never yielded results. • Systemic Apathy: Upon resigning, multiple senior leaders validated my grievances but admitted the firm’s scale made it "too big to change," suggesting a lack of appetite for cultural improvement. Additionally, there is no tangible reward in pushing initiatives that will improve the culture no-one feels any incentive to do it. • Impotent people leadership: I imagine that pre-COVID when there was a more presential culture and project opportunities were more available, people leadership was a helpful forum for advice on career direction and network expansion. Due to the size of the AI & Data portfolio and the limited opportunities available, this relationship offered very little practical value in navigating the firm.