Pros

Super rewarding job. I was always learning and being stretched. It provides a fantastic base coming out of an MBA program. Best job experience I've ever had!

Cons

Very demanding job overall - long hours and lots of travel. Not particularly conducive to family life or having kids.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to think about how to get employees to invest for the long term as the work-life balance makes it very difficult to think about this career with a family.

Pros

- Down-to-earth people, yet also friendly, pragmatic, and smart
- A genuine interest, at manager level, to improve junior consultants' performance
- Plenty (almost too much) face time with the client
- "Green" initiatives being employed at most offices in North America
- Offices are very open; partners usually have an open-door policy

Cons

- Simply put, the firm's outlook is horrible. Its hiring strategy in 2009 indicates that the firm is way off-base when it comes to establishing workforce targets and effectively projecting workloads over the next year.
- Workload is brutal (~70+ hours), and the client locations aren't much to shake a stick at (want to spend a summer in central Kentucky?)
- "Global firm" model means that you could be travelling across the street for a client or across the country on a red-eye; lots of variability
- Virtually zero strategy work; it's all sourcing, cost reduction, and IT work at this point
- Creativity is simply not valued. A lot of ATK's intellectual capital (which is fantastic) is almost used as a crutch in client engagements
- Establishing a positive rapport with the client is frowned upon
- Review processes are opaque

Advice to Senior Management

Aligning hiring targets with the firms you want to become (BCG, McK, Bain) would be the first step. Otherwise, there's no way you'll be able to win against the big guys. In addition, you should learn to appreciate the talent you hire -- word travels fast at business schools how you really ran some of your people through the ringer, and it's only going to harm you when top talent has a choice between not only M/B/B, but some of the firms that you're beating for work but have a stronger culture.

Pros

Good people - almost everyone is pretty nice and approachable, even up to top level management
Work can be interesting - depends on the project but there are some interesting projects that come up from time to time
Good reputation - It is respected by top business schools and other consulting firms in the industry
Plenty of national travel - Though this gets tiring pretty quick

Cons

Long hours - Depending on the project or manager your life could be horrible. Often there are excuses given as to why the particular project you're on is "abnormally" intense, but if you talk to enough employees you will find that almost all of them have had one or multiple horrible projects, it is not a particularly rare occurrence. To clarify on hours, 50 hours a week is basically the minimum, with average hours being around 60 and many people up past 70... this is excluding travel time too. Horrible projects could mean you're up till 2am most weekdays, then up at 7am the next morning. While weekend work is typically not the norm, you are pretty much expected to be available on any weekend if required, or answer basic emails, which can be a pain.

Great people, except you barely get to know them - your home office may be full of people you like, but you only see them 1 day a week. Similarly, if you move to another project every few months you don't see your old teammates anymore. Great to meet people, but not great to know people.

Demanding travel schedule - Virtually every project won't be local and you'll be flying out every Monday morning and coming back every Thursday night. If you're in New York or Chicago maybe you could get 1 in 3 or 4 projects local but they may not be the most thrilling assignments. Geography is not considered enough when staffing, so sometimes you will have people in the same role flying back and forth inbetween two cities, whereas both could be local if they traded projects.

Advice to Senior Management

Consider people's work-life balance more than the constant desire to "over deliver" to clients. Staffing should be more flexible in having people roll off/on to assignments.

Pros

The people, the people, the people. ATK people are strong intellectually, and just great people to get to know and to work with. Which is a good thing, because you will be working side by side with them, for long periods of time and generally in pretty crap locations...
That said, people are too quick to dismiss ATK as an operational consulting shop. There is a lot of really cutting-edge strategy work happening here: we just don't market ourselves as effectively as the Big Three, nor do we have as strong as a brand. Personally, I have only done one pure operations project since I started here three years ago. The balance of my time: marketing strategy (Consumer products), growth strategy (integrated oil producer), innovation and NPD (finance), and G&A transformation (apparel retail). So ATK definitely can offer industry and functional variety. Another pro is its leadership at the top. Laudicina is a visionary.

Cons

Travel: Travel is non-stop, continuous, and burdensome on the soul. That said, all consultants travel all the time, but ATK is likely worse than some (Bain, BCG) and at par with others (Booz, Mck). A lot can be done to manage client expectations around this issue, and to optimize staffing for life as well as work.
Processes: ATK is an 80 year old start-up. AFter the 2005 buyout, the firm started from scratch. So we are still building core processes. Examples: We have pretty mediocre intellectual capital develpoment, dissemination processes and tools, pretty crap financial management at the partnership level (a pareto of partner contribution would reveal a long tail, i suspect), and not the strongest people review processe (although its getting better).

Advice to Senior Management

Scale. We need to scale.

Pros

Good work experience you can find in any large consulting firm.

Cons

No clear career path
Promotions are based on politics not capabilities or accomplishments
Huge discrepancies between salaries
Benefits are hard to come by unless negotiated at the beginning

Advice to Senior Management

Transparent management is a requirement for sustainability

Pros

Decent experience in a short period of time.

Cons

Cultures are different from one office to the next; turning into a procurement boutique firm; management not direct with the firm's status; the path to promotion is political instead of merit based.

Advice to Senior Management

diversify projects, be more direct with consultants

Pros

Gain a lot of experience in a short amount of time.

Cons

No work/life balance. I Traveled 4 days per week every week for 18 months.

Advice to Senior Management

Give employees some time on the beach between projects at least once a year. Even a few days would be nice.

Pros

Broad range of project exposure, talented consultants, many international project opportunities, and very flexible regarding vacation / leaves of absence.

Cons

Poor work-life balance on many projects.

Advice to Senior Management

No advice for senior managment

Pros

Decent place to start a career, post-MBA

Cons

Good work, whenever it happens, is merely expected and rarely recognized. However, project leaders are quick to dish out negative feedback

Advice to Senior Management

Need to invest in more innovative solutions to provide to the market

Pros

It's a generic consulting firm that deals with old-business industries and old-business ideas. If your goal is to just make money and go to business school, this is a great place to start.

Cons

New ideas are not welcome, senior management does not respond well to feedback, co-workers routinely throw each other under the bus in order to advance themselves. Strap in, follow the rules, kiss up and the money and recommendations will not be a problem.

Advice to Senior Management

You are not movers and shakers. Your work is the same work you've done for years, the same methodologies with different packaging. Take some risks, invest in actually creating new ideas or cheaper firms will eat up your market.