WARNING- Only for extroverts and experts - S & O consulting - Senior Consultant - S&O Deloitte Employee Review

2.0
24 May 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Please note, this is only for strategy and operations folks. Deloitte Consulting is an amazing company with an amazing reputation. The training is top notch. Deloitte university is still the coolest place I've ever been to in my life. If you love traveling, then this is the best place to be. You'll quickly rack-up some major points and privileges, plus you can flex your travel I.e instead of returning home every week, you can choose to travel to other parts of the country and spend weekends there. Back office support is really top notch, things like expenses, and HR stuff are well planned and executed. Work life balance varies from person to person and project to project. The Deloitte name on your resume does not hurt, I get pestered by recruiters every single day because of my experience working there. Also, the pay varies a lot. If you're hired from a top MBA, then your pay may be competitive with the MBBs, but if you're joining from a smaller firm or non-consulting, they'll offer an increment on your current salary

Cons

Notice that I didn't say anything about the actual work in the pros section. If you're coming here for hard core strategy work, then good luck finding that unicorn. Project work, even in S&O, is mostly some type of technology implementation support where the S&O folks tend to be the project managers or business process planners. Clients seem to engage Deloitte after they've made their strategic decisions and need a firm with a large implementation manpower in technology, human capital or business process transformations. Trust me, the day to days on these projects are not worth your time. The above paragraph only applies to folks who can find a project. The staffing model at Deloitte is downright horrific. I still get nightmares from what I had to do to get staffed there I.e kiss a lot of butts. When you join, you're basically internally unemployed, so you have to do everything you will do if you are actually looking for a job. I.e get a watertight resume, which you'll have to customize to any job openings, then apply for those jobs with a cover email. Then interview, then also have good referrals. Yep, it's a job market, and just like every job market, all the rules of competition, unconscious biases and stereotypes applies to. So to give yourself a fighting chance, you have to be known by the right people, which means, you need to network your butt off. I'm an introvert, but I had more than 50 1 on 1s with senior folks when I joined the firm. I don't think it helped much, as I still spent my first 3 months at the firm without a billable project I.e on the beach. It's not uncommon to see folks who have been on the beach for an entire review cycle (6 months), those get fired ASAP as they are seen to not fit the firm culture. At Deloitte, you are in charge of your own career, which also means you are on your own!!! Being successful here is not really about how smart you are, you only get the chance to show that if you are properly staffed. It's really about being able to navigate this behemoth of a firm effectively and ensuring the system works in your favor. This can only happen if you are someone who is well liked by the right people and can secure nice projects on a consistent basis (even before most other folks find out about the project), hence the title of this review. I've also seen folks who have some specific sort after skills be successful here e.g the firm did a lot of EMR implementation projects for hospitals when I was there, so people with experience in EMR softwares or folks with strong healthcare provider backgrounds were in high demand (again, this is all implementation stuff).

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5.0
8 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- great benefits - great career progression and opportunity - you get what you put in - lots of opportunities to grow your network and meet wonderful people

Cons

- can unfortunately have a bad experience with a bad project, but there are avenues to deal with it

5.0
4 Aug 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

These folks know exactly what they are doing. They set high standards, and consistently deliver. Their project expectations and planning is excellent. The top level management folks are extremely smart and have a great sense of vision and planning. If you go to company social events (which are very frequent by the way), it is quite easy to have conversations with upper management people (Partners). Deloitte's hiring pattern is very consistent. For the young starters, they hire smart, well spoken, and subtly aggressive candidates. They have excellent training and knowledge management. They have a well oiled and empowered HR and Tech Support group. Things get done pretty fast. Their paid time off program is really great, and pretty straight forward. No messing about. They have a big social responsibility program that encourages volunteering. It also presents a great opportunity for youngsters to take event organizing responsibilities. This can be very very useful. Once, I volunteered for an event where we painted rooms for an orphanage center. There was a young guy who did the organizing. We were 10-12 people, with 3 senior executives actually doing paintwork. Quite unique. I have personally seen that Deloitte's top talents tend to start young, spend a 3-4 years, then take a hiatus to pursue a Graduate Degree (typically an MBA). The firm sometimes re-hires these consultants after their MBA with generous financial incentives. They offer much better packages to folks graduating from top universities. Sometimes they can offer huge joining bonuses. I worked in the IT consulting division.They tend to get top-end projects. On projects, the average age seems pretty low. A lot of 20-somethings, then there are a handful of 30-40 year old people and some senior Management folks. Beginner salaries can be a bit low. (which is expected. It takes some time to build credibility in the Consulting business) Overall, a great place to start your professional career. If you pay attention, you will get seasoned very quickly.

Cons

Work-life balance can become poor, especially during tight project timelines (This is expected in the Consulting Business). The employees have a significant amount of "firm-internal" training and knowledge contribution tasks. There are annual goal expectations. It can get tedious if you continuously work on high demand projects. There is intense competition, especially during targeted promotion/milestone years. There can be some backstabbing. It's part of the experience. It is not as bad as it sounds, and seems manageable. A lot of times, being young and inexperienced has it's flaws. The company has a simple way of seasoning consultants. They get pushed into high pressure situations, and they learn fast, and quickly start managing their own work. But they tend to be blind towards intricate details, especially in complicated IT product implementations. This has an interesting effect. If someone is able to do the hands-on work, everyone else tries to piggy-back on that person for their actual work. The hands-on guy gets overwhelmed, and others try to use him/her as a key resource. -- I personally went through a crunch project, and found a number of people "managing expectations" (piggy backing), while a handful of people actually knew the end-to-end solution and did the hands-on work. This created a lot more work and mental anguish than needed. Because of the expressed pressure, the hands-on guys have a hard time building and growing their reputation and subsequent performance evaluation rating. This also affects the project execution timelines. IMPORTANT: Make sure you thoroughly read through your employment agreement and understand the implications. In recent years, they have started hiring for specific projects ONLY. This falls under a particular "AMS service line". In this case, if your assigned project gets into a problem, you are exposed to the risk of employment termination. Their HR and Management are very helpful, and they will try to get you a new project. But there are several constraints like location, your skills, and limited time. I went through this, and it was somewhat unnerving. This was one of the reasons I ended up leaving the company.

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