Booz Allen Hamilton Reviews

Pros – This is a great place to work If you're willing to work hard and learn to work within the culture

Cons – Lots of unwritten "rules" - just find a good mentor or two to guide you through

Advice to Senior Management – Keep leading

Pros – Good opportunities for growth. The firm really puts a lot of time and energy into the employee review process and holds managers accountable for developing their staff. The feedback from the reviews are helpful in identifying growth areas and are tailored for your own career goals.

Cons – Work life balance can be hard to achieve, especially for senior staff members. Also, it is becoming harder to maintain the same culture as the firm has grown and senior management has become more distant.

Advice to Senior Management – The firm has grown tremendously in the past decade. Take a closer look at what has made the firm such a great company to work for and ensure the core components don't get lost in the shuffle of all the change that is happening.

Pros – Job Satisfaction really deoends on the project and management team

Cons – There is no clear path to advancing unless you are on the right team and have the right manager

Advice to Senior Management – Provide more opportunity to look outside the box for supporting clients and delivering solutions that add value.

Pros – Your experience at Booz Allen will be largely dependent upon your manager (FLL) and project. I've been fortunate enough to stay billable during my time here (approx. 8 years) and projects have been challenging and engaging. Work / life balance and flex-schedules are a big selling point. Yes, there are surge periods of proposal work, marketing, white paper, etc but to be objective, most of our work schedule is M-F, 9~5. For a 'consulting' gig, this is more than reasonable. If you're just starting your career or an experienced hire looking for work / life balance, Booz Allen is the place.

Cons – As I stated earlier, your experience at Booz Allen will be largely dependent upon your manager (FLL) and project. I've had some TERRIBLE managers and Senior Associates that showed little to no empathy towards their people or their development. And there does not appear to be any incentive for them to change, e.g. as long as they bring in the contracts.
If you're looking to advance beyond Associate, you'd better network, network, network, build your business case, and win those contracts. Otherwise, realize you'll be an Associate for the rest of your time at Booz. As others have stated, Booz Allen's compensation is below the mean.

Advice to Senior Management – Train, Mentor, Grow your Level IV (Sr Associates) to become effective managers. Just because he/she wins contracts and grows staff, does NOT make them effective managers or leaders.
GIve more 'tenured' Associates an opportunity to advance within the firm. The "new" Associate position will help but you will lose your most experienced staff if they see no opportunities to advance within the firm.

Pros – Comapny location is close to my home, pay is OK, managers are nice people, kitchens are well stocked; cleaning staff are doing their job.

Cons – Office space is tight; buildings are too cold in summer time; too many junk emails coming from various committees every day.

Advice to Senior Management – Increase salary and bonuses more often; Provide free dinners when employees have to work late into the night; Provide free breakfasts too.

Pros – Tradition/Heritage, Job Security (all Government contracts now), Pay. Great place to gain experience, learn consulting/contracts biz. If you have a good project and a good manager, you will have a great experience. Company tries to have high standards, ethics, etc. Very organized. If you don't mind Dilbert gray-cubicle hell, conform, and do what you are told, you'll enjoy. Very structured.

Cons – Growing so large, you can get lost in the shuffle. To save money, they are sending more and more employees to work "on site" client-side. You get disconnected from the hive, the culture. I didn't get to know other associates/consultants. Management is more concerned about filling positions/contracts than people. They follow the money and hire just about anyone to fill the contract. As others have posted, becoming more contract, "fill a seat" work than true consultant. Since private side gone, all government. My experience was military. If they want your opinion, they'll tell you it. Not consulting. My manager rarely visited the client, did not provide project mgt. We were left to fend for selves, yet not empowered to create necessary change. Heard great stories about McLean and "back East". Seemed my location had developed its own culture and style.

Advice to Senior Management – Visit satellite offices and probe employees there - find out differences between "Headquarters" processes and culture vs. the reality. Revamp exhaustive 360 feedback (it is ridiculous - someone needs to call "Emperor's New Clothes" on it). Ensure sufficient project mgt is taking place, particularly for those 100% client-side - if client is not providing project mgt, then Booz leadership must. Get rid of poor managers. Create alternative career paths, there seems to be only one - and not everyone is cut out to work with soft skills, personnel issues, motivation, leadership, etc. My manager seemed to be only concerned with money and contracts - very dehumanizing experience. Some need to be placed in a corner office and work solely on contracts, do NOT let them interface with humans.

Pros – Steady and not too demanding. I have worked in Silicon Valley and working for BAH is like working for the gov't slow and steady. Things move at a glacial pace comparatively. Good balance of work and life. Many people have complained about the balance yet most of them have not worked in the real world.

Very secure.... Salary is not that great compared to others but you have to really screw up to get fired.

Cons – Alot of overhead and deadwood. Need to create better accountability for Profit and Loss. Too many level 5's that don't truly have a business case.

This year's pay pool is joke. If wasn't for the bad economy people would walk. But I guess we need to pay Carlisle back their money.

In CA if your program is killed you have 2 weeks to find a job and then you are terminated. Other BAH offices are very good keeping people employed.

Advice to Senior Management – Empower your people more!!! Be more aggressive. The future IPO is going to require you to be more aggressive. Hire less former SES and FOGO levels. Get people who actually know how to get something done and pay them well.

Don't be so afraid of OCI that it prevents you from competing on more lucrative governent contracts. Suggest to the client to do more FFP. We need to have be able to take on more risk.

I also don't see how going public will not change the culture. Unlike most BAH people I have worked for a Fortune 100 public company and managed a P&L. Meeting a quarterly number vice annual number is going to put alot of stress on people who have never had to meet this expectation.

Branch out into commercial ASAP. Staying on the gov't mammary gland is safe but you won't be able to meet your wall street financial targets at 8% margins.

Get out of sustainment business. By staying in the sustainment portion of programs we are diluting the value of thought leadership. Thought leadership you can charge a premium for. When you get into sustainment/daily service operations you can't charge the same rates and before long the client asks why should I continue to pay $250K for someone when the same person in a sustainment role will only be charged at $200K. or less. This is a dangerous situation to be in as it devalues the thought leadership efforts of the firm.

Pros – -If you land a good manager and/or a good project you can definitely learn a lot!
-Great People
-Steady Work
-Good name to have on the resume, especially in the DC area and govt contracting industry
-Safe place to be
-Benefits are standard, however the perks (i.e. softball league) are outstanding
-If you're interested in govt contracting this is the place to be!

Cons – -If you land a bad manager and/or a bad project you can be sitting on the bench for a long period of time or stuck on a long term project learning very little.
-HR/Recruiting is horrible! This is true as a potential employee and an actual employee. Hands down the worst in the area.
-No central resource staffing group meaning employees are responsible for finding their own project work. This can prove difficult as Level 4 incentives are misaligned when it comes to staffing projects.
-Low pay (due to the Booz Allen name)
-Because of the size you can often feel like a cog in the machine
-Too much of a hierarchy - folks at 5 and 6 are ex-military folks who are only there for their connections and do little else than look down on 1s, 2s and 3s.
-A general "old school" and static feel

Advice to Senior Management – Keep doing what you're doing but provide a better staffing solution and fix HR!

Pros – With the expanding federal government, the opportunities as a government consultant will grow in step. There are a lot of diverse projects to get involved with, if your manager supports you.

Cons – The firm is deploying much more of its consultants to the client site. While this makes completing projects easier, it makes it difficult to develop relationships within the local Booz Allen office, conflicting with the firm's emphasis that its consultants build large networks.

Advice to Senior Management – Provide more growth opportunities for those consultants that are subject matter experts instead of marketing mavens. The assessment process, while great in theory, does not work in practice--it is just a way for managers to shed their people development responsibilities onto lower echelon personnel.

Pros – There are a lot of very well connected people walking the halls in McLean, VA. It is a very interesting environement to work in, you have to be very comfortable dealing with the government red tape. Compensation was acceptable, but I did have to work hard and negotiate it back up to where I was with my pervious employer.

Cons – They said you can meet anyone from an Astronaut to a Prima Ballerina when I hired on and they were correct. But, they also enticed me with an overseas opportunity... unfortunately when I actually joined three of the key people within my group quit! (all at once). They had had enough, this was an extreme case and does not happen often. Given how slowly partners react to their internal organizational troubles it makes sense...

Advice to Senior Management – Improve the work life balance for the teams. As in any organization there are people who seem to work 24x7 and just as many (if not more) who are just barely doing 9-5 M-F... They need to purge some of that dead weight (govt or not) and help out the work horses.