Pros

- Good vacation time
- Nice people to work with
- Exposure to many industries
- Good perks...lots of employee discounts, get to keep frequent flier miles and hotel points

Cons

- Long hours
- Work can be really boring at times
- It's more important that you have billable hours than that you are building up a solid skill set
- Sometimes you have little say over which projects you are assigned to
- The feedback/review process is set up well, but having one bad project where you don't get along well with your manager can hold you back in terms of rankings and promotions
- Way to much emphasis on networking...it's more important who you know than what you know

Advice to Senior Management

Give more support to Analysts when they are assigned to their first few projects. If you are going to assign us to a community (ex. Oracle or SAP), make sure we are working on projects related to that community. Don't force analysts onto projects that they have no interest in, especially when they know what they are interested in and where they want to develop their skills.

Pros

There are lots and frequent changes.

Cons

You must adopt the changes and embrace it

Advice to Senior Management

Keep the stock price high.

Pros

Some people are fantastic - but it's the same everywhere
Looks good on you CV, HR people tend to be lemmings...

Cons

Too many to list, suffice to say that I will never buy professional services from a public company

Advice to Senior Management

Most of these guys should learn what consulting 101 is...

Pros

Respect for work life balance: stretches of long days are offset by comp days, easy to request and get vacation days off. Company encourages good balance.

Cons

Once you've completed a project in a specific area, it's easy to be labeled an 'expert' in that field and difficult to move on to other type of projects.

Advice to Senior Management

Allow analysts the opportunity to try various types of projects before they are placed in one practice. This would help best identify their strengths.

Pros

The brand, tools and processes are very useful for a career.

Cons

At every level in PDC there is a terrible lack of initiative.

Advice to Senior Management

PDC is completly different from the rest of Accenture and ought to be sorted out.

Pros

good people
travel perks
work/life balance

It is a well organized company that values its people most. I highly recommend it for a place to start a career.

Cons

lower pay

It does vary what group you are in to make your experience. Consulting usually requires a large amount of travel and hours can be longer.

Advice to Senior Management

Be flexible with employees who want to take time off.

Pros

Great people focused on delivering solutions. Three major workforces offer opportunity on many fronts. Excellent implementation capability and depth of knowledge capital. Great people - even though I already said it - very true.

Cons

Still very much a consulting driven company with up or out mentality. Performance feedback varies in consistency/frequency given. In my case not often enough to make critical changes. If you are in the consuting workforce - 100% travel.

Advice to Senior Management

Simplify the feedback process and find a way to make a POSITIVE part of the culture. Continually look for ways to help folks balance the heavy travel.

Pros

Great people, energetic culture, established brand, great place to learn how to be professional...overall an excellent place to start a career

Cons

Getting on interesting projects can be difficult, not too much work that is not IT-related coming out of undergrad, hours can be demanding, easy to get pigeon-holed

Advice to Senior Management

Offer a link between undergrad opportunities and post-MBA opportunities...improve utilization of "one-stop-shop" capabilities...and do not let St. Charles go away!

Pros

great training scheme, lots of responsabilities early on, good travel opportunities, young and eager co-workers

Cons

pay is horrible, life sacrifices made can be high, work diversity is not nearly as good as supposed to be, promotion is a black box

Advice to Senior Management

try to get the glamour back into management consulting - its what makes people happy and it makes them more willing to rough it up with long hours at work etc.

Pros

1. Intelligent, involved leadership in my group
2. Team members that wanted to do well
3. Opportunity to meet and work with other team members globally
4. Flexible work arrangements (very helpful with family)
5. Committed to Core Values (see Cons regarding a few exceptions)
6. Good training
7. Exciting work
8. Opportunity to have your opinion/perspective listened to

I joined as an "experienced hire" into the Enterprise Workforce. I was challenged by "lifers" but quickly accepted and welcomed to the team as I proved myself -- nothing different than I had expected and had experienced at my previous job.

I enjoyed working for Accenture and would work for Accenture again given the right opportunity (cannot say that about my current employer). Left for family reasons (to be closer to my family).

Cons

1. A few Senior Executives who felt it was permissible to treat others with a lack of respect or to actually state falsehoods during evaluations (however, out of probably 200 + Senior Executives that I worked with, this was limited to few than five)
2. Pay
3. Work/Life Balance (however, in reality this is not significantly different from my current employer)
4. If you not "consulting" you are treated as a second or third class citizen (seemed that some in Management were attempting to address this but it still existed)

Advice to Senior Management

Salary need to continue to be aligned to the contribution made; Incentive compensation must be understandable if it is going to "incent" performance (interestingly, Accenture wants clearly defined expectations and asosciated rewards in its contracts but fails to provide this to their employees); make even outstanding Senior Executives adhere to the Core Values regarding Integrity and Respect for the Individual -- afterall, if they are willing to lie in Performance Evaluations in order to grind their axes are they also willing to lie about their own performance or that of their projects?