Booz Allen Hamilton Reviews in Norfolk, VA Area

Pros

Focus on the client and delivery of quality products.
Collegial work environment and solid benefits package.
Great work life balance with many opportunities to give back to the community.

Cons

Challenging times in the Defense Market.
Preference to hire new rather than train and repurpose current employees.
Being a publicly traded company.

Advice to Senior Management

Offer to train each employee in a secondary specialty that supports an emerging or in demand service offering. Training should start within two months after the employee's 1 year anniversary. Will help the firm integrate service offerings across markets and provide clients improved performance.

Pros

There are many facets of the company for making your mark. If one door is closed you can immediately be assigned to another team to continue your progession.

Cons

The demands of government contracting leads to a variable future. If and when the government decides to shed contractors, the higher priced companies are usually the first to go.

Advice to Senior Management

Offer incentives to lower level employees. It creates more of an 'us versus them" mentality when management is offered stock options and bonuses and nothing trickles down.

Pros

Great Co-workers
Good pay for workers

Cons

Management out of touch with employees.
Politics is vicious to the point of interfering with careers.
If you don't want to advance to a higher level, they will find reasons to get rid of you.
360 Employees reviews are not true to form.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your lower ranking employees. Employees should be treated like gold. They are your main assets.

Pros

A very pro-family atmosphere. Very flexible with your time during family emergencies and will work with the client to ensure you are covered during those situations. A mature business model that manages to hold its own quite well in the world or government contracting. Great Benefits and profit sharing, which is historically about 10% of your annual income. This is very nice and tops most companies out there. If you can land a job at this company and can withstand the "cons" you can have a pretty nice lttle nest egg after about 7-10 years.

Cons

It's a good old boy network within the company, no question about it. You need to have 3 words associated with your resume: Retired, Military, Officer. Two will get you where you want to go. Three will get you all the way to the top. One, forget it and worse if you have NONE well... get your profit sharing and limited experience while you're there and find another place to work if you're looking to grow as a professional. What's nice for women, here in the con section, is that if you have those words on your resume, you're in with the boys for the most part. It's a tight network, welcome home. And women make pretty much what the men make in the company. If there is a disparity, you can usually find it favors either the male or the female with slightly more experience. There are some very well paid women at this company with those three words on their resume and the company has been widely recognized for such.

Advice to Senior Management

The real world doesn't work like the military or government does. If you want to take Booz to the next level, you are going to have to wash out all the "military and government think" that abounds within your organization, thus accepting whatever comes in that process. Until then, you will wallow in your own stagnation. Good luck. The world is moving on.

Pros

Work-Life Balance support was a number one priority. Training program for its employees unmatched by any other Defense company.

Cons

At times, a lot of pressure to grow the business.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the support to your employees.

Pros

Has a good starting salary and benefeits

Cons

There is no work/life balance. They say that as a lower level employee that you are only given a 42 hour work week. This is what they think should be done in a 42 hour work week and is not a reality. It is more like a 50 to 60 hour work week, though If you charge more than these hours you had better have a good reason for it. Overall a bad experience and that's why I'm going back to where I came from.

Advice to Senior Management

Live up to what your core values are.

Pros

Great people...very dedicated to their profession.
Looks good on your resume.
All things being equal, a good reputation with regards to government clients.
Did I mention the great folks?

Cons

If you're working on client site, it's easy to be forgotten.
The new "Lead Associate" level has yet to be properly defined.
There are no clear promotion criteria...it changes from team to team.
Too matrixed.
This is NOT the same company it was even 12 months ago. I find very little to distinguish us from SAIC, General Dynamics, etc...
The current state of growth is unsustainable...furthermore, an organization can't grow 20% year over year for nine years and still expect the same level of small-firm "intimacy."
Everything now is about the bottom dollar, courtesy of our Venture Capital partners. Anyone who doesn't realize this is blind.
And finally...the market is starting to shrink (fewer discretionary and suplemental government dollars). This will put the firm in a very precarious position in 12-18 months when it has to compete and win large procurements to just keep market share. At that point, Booz Allen becomes a commodity broker (see other firms mentioned above).

Advice to Senior Management

Be brutally honest on what the future holds. And allow your junior staff more "freedom of movement." There are too many people to "check with" before a decision is made.

Pros

The Firm provides ample opportunity for Training.

The Firm provides ample opportunities for networking via after hours social functions.

Very Talented, Technically Proficient Co-workers

Cons

Difficult to obtain follow-on work once your main tasking expires. Management (Level IV and V) is not very engaged in developing new business opportunities to maintain staff employment.

As a level III preparing an annual assessment on a total stranger, I feel the personnel assessment process is just Management's way of offloading one of their key tasks to lower level personnel. Having been an assessor 3 times and an assessee twice, I feel my performance was underestimated because the assessor had no clue about the real details of my job performance; likewise when I was an assessor, I felt the reviews I turned in were somewhat superficial.

Not a big fan of getting paid once a month.

When you spend 40 hour a week on the client site, you necesarily have a limited view of what's going on at the main office. Seems the current setup favors folks who actually have a desk at the main office.

The business case requirement for promotion to Level IV is a load of baloney. Again, in my two years with the Firm, I never saw an off-site Level III get the Level IV promotion.

Archaic Dress Code requirements. Professionals need not be told how to dress professionallly

Advice to Senior Management

Like to see more aggressiveness in developing new business.

Like to see a little more urgency and participation in setting up follow-on assignments.

Lose the once-a month pay schedule, or at least offer more options.

Pros

Lots of opportunity, great people, professionalism

Cons

Sometimes work is a bit tedious

Advice to Senior Management

Take care of the workforce

Pros

I've have really enjoyed my time with Booz Allen. Compared to other companies I've worked for, they put a lot of effort into making you feel a part of larger team. I think a lot of the culture stems from the large amount of employees with prior military experience. Information sharing and williness to help out another employee with a project, even one you're not on, is just part of the company culture.

Cons

The Norfolk office is growing quickly so I'd say the only "con" is keeping up with all the new hires and trying to maintain that "small office" camaraderie.

Advice to Senior Management

n/a