Accenture Reviews in Canada

Pros

Thousands of free self-paced online training programs to develop and augment skills in your line of work. If you do well, there are always opportunities to work in other countries and learn how to work with colleagues from a different culture. Senior executive support and mentoring programs. High technology environment. Good place to build on your leadership skills, learn new processes, and introduce improvements in operations. The company encourages continuous improvements and innovation. Regular site visits by top management. Good networking opportunities. People help when you ask for help.

Cons

Difficult to navigate your career when you roll off a project. You have a limited shelf life if you're assigned to a project and you end up searching and sometimes fighting for a role in another project. Project performance really depends on whoever is assigned as the project manager so there's no guarantee that all moving parts are going to perform well.

Advice to Senior Management

Manage staff deployment better by ensuring that employees have a project to go to when they roll off. Improve quality of project management for both old projects and new projects by consistently implementing quality assurance activities and deploying service management or quality assurance teams in production sites rather than just doing a review over the phone. Review the service quality for each scope with both the operations teams and the clients to really get a good understanding if expectations are being met or if there are problems. Hire more experienced outsourcing managers to increase service delivery expertise in projects.

Pros

Supportive work network always willing to help, plenty of opportunities to grow your skills and do things usually given to very senior people giving you experience that you would normally not get for years

Cons

biased performance system sometimes leading to who you know instead of how well you do, long work hours and sometimes little recognition for your hard work

Advice to Senior Management

Set expectations with employees more frequently, also if you want to be a top consulting firm then employees should be compensated at the top not at the 50 percentile

Pros

The company at least on the surface and all of its material wants you to do the responsible thing with clients: create value, treat their data with respect, work hard for them, and deliver on time.
The benefits package: vision, medical, dental etc is adequate. Compensation is probably on average or just below industry level. With over 200k in headcount you can't be above the industry average.

The company has logistical support departments to help you travel, manage emergencies, and relocate to another country.

Cons

1. Managers can be vindictive and abusive. One standard for them and another for everyone below.
2. Smart workers usually leave because they are too busy coding and delivering to actually care about petty politics, CYA and butt kissing.
3. This company is anything but a meritocracy. They spend more time encouraging you to 'network' to get on projects, rather than rely on your own skills and experince.
4. The worst aspect of working for accenture is that the 'managers', and 'senior managers' become lifers and have no discernible skills of their own. At that point, they flock to projects before everyone else does because of their connections. Then they bill the client like it's going out of style and bring in all of their friends from around the continent. They claim flights, hotels, per diems and rental cars. This jacks up the cost to the client, nothing is delivered in the requirements, plan and design phase. All they produce are spreadsheets, visio diagrams and powerpoint slides. With millions spent and nothing but provisioning models and a barrage of three letter acronyms (TLAs), the client generally denies more bodies on the projects, shuts it down or descopes it, sues Accenture and cuts its losses. I've saw this happen consistently.
5. When it comes to promotions and ratings, people are rated against their peers which is fair. But for one person to sit on the bench all the while they're struggling and willing to do whatever it takes to get on even most undesirable roles only to get no response from the role contacts is simply a good reason for a consultant or analyst to bail from the company.

Advice to Senior Management

Managment Lifers: in it for hotels, flights, rental cars (fuel included) and per diems should be fired outright. There is no other way around it. Giants fall. It wouldn't be the first time as more agile competitors bite a chunk out of Accenture's business. The lack of respect for the people who actually do something of value should not be tolerated. If anything, the company should test and train its managers and not consultants.

Pros

After spending more than 3 years with the company, i found accenture to be hit or miss. Your career progress entirely depends on the type of roles you get. Few pros on top of my head:
 - Online training courses
 - Unpaid time-off
 - Few good S. Managers

Cons

It's a long list:
 - "UNFAIR SALARY": Well below market
 - Only few lucky ones get good roles (very true for consulting and leftovers go to solutions)
 - No Vendor Training: Training managers will do or say anything to say no to training requests
 - No work-life balance : and if someone asks for one, will get hammered during performance ratings
 - Laddering process: Not even close to the performance ratings one receives. Project managers can give any kind of ratings, but they are not the ones who decides on annual pay revisions and promotions
 - Inner circle: works well within accenture
 - Complex Corporate Hierarchy: Take 10 years in solutions to become a manager vs. 5 years in Consulting. I am one of the lucky ones to skip this hierarchy when joined Accenture years back.
 - No HR support: hmmm.... ideally HR should be a channel between employees and senior leadership, but will make the employees take the hit (just to keep the "Upper management" happy).
 - Problem creator tags: one has to be very careful in bringing their issues to the senior leadership as it can make things worse.

Advice to Senior Management

Accenture intrinsic assets are the employees, leadership should focus on how to keep them engaged, make them feel they are worth something and don't think they don't understand the psychology behind every move Leadership makes.

Pros

This is the best place to develop yourself and fell a real sense of community / team spirit. It is the unique consulting firm living as "One Global Network" throughout the world.

Cons

Long hours of work due to very passionate people.

Advice to Senior Management

Give more visibility of what are all possible career paths and how to access it.

Pros

Good place to start your career. Generally the company encourage its employee to take challenge and offer various of opportunities to grow.

Cons

Usually need to work long hours to get good performance. No good for work and life balance.

Pros

young energetic workforce
challenging and engaging
opportunity to travel

Cons

terrible pay
no work life balance
no opportunities for growth
office politics

Advice to Senior Management

be honest to employees about growth and development

Pros

Great people developers. Been very impressed with quality of project teams compared to other companies I have worked with in the past

Cons

Work life balance can be an issue sometimes. Salary competitiveness is currently being questioned.

Advice to Senior Management

Review compensation packages of top performers.

Pros

The people in my department.

Cons

The people outside my department.

Pros

- Collegial atmosphere
- Fun, smart, hardworking colleagues
- Interesting variety of project opportunities
- Opportunities to travel and the perks that come with travel
- Exposure to different industries
- A lot of ownership even as an analyst
- Fair performance review system - career counseling great
- Approacheable and supportive senior mangement

Left ACN having made long-lasting friendships and professional relationships. I moved on to one of the top 5 business schools and now to Wall St. and I miss the collegial atmosphere I had experienced before.

Cons

- Company pigeon-holes - early on and it is very hard to pursue opportunities in different functional groups
- Compensation was below industry
- Experience at ACN is really hit or miss. It depends a lot on what you get started on when you join the company. I have been lucky to work with a great client, supportive senior management and a great career counseler who looked out for me, but I've seen a number of others being stuck in a role that did not advance their learnings for a long time.

Advice to Senior Management

Company needs to work on talent retention - it's not just about the pay but about giving people opportunities to move around and try new things. ACN needs to believe that people are mostly smart and will pick up new skills quickly.

Also, why does the company places bright new analysts from finance and economics education in systems groups. Wonder why these people leave in droves?