Pros

Flat hierarchies
Collaborative culture
Great, fun team
Low-risk, stable jobs
Top clients

Cons

Compensation
HR overall
IT overall
Support infrastructure
Red tape in getting certain internal things done

Advice to Senior Management

Make a serious effort to become one of the top consulting firms as measured in several surveys and rankings - won't be easy!

Pros

Capgemini Brand is excellent
Pays well and gives opportunity to fresh grads

Cons

Canada's top leadership lacks commitment
No new account success / limited growth opportunity
No mentoring capability

Advice to Senior Management

France/US needs to pay attention. Conduct root/cause analysis.
Time for change if you want canada to grow.

Pros

- Good Brand Image
- Excellent training sessions to attend
- Top class clientèle through out the world especially strong in Europe

Cons

- Middle mgmt is worst, they will never listen to the developers
- Managers feel themselves like CEOs
- Performance review is worst and many managers not even discuss with the developers and instead just put the default ratings.
- Lack of career guidance from the managers and they are least bother about developer's career. What managers simply look is billing of developers...that's it
- There is no forum for employees to raise their voice
- Highly impossible to get into any project which is different from your geography
- Worst thing is managers gives their developers on loan to other managers when the developer is on bench....so called slave system
- Even if you find out a project for yourself during the bench manager will not allow you to transfer to that geography instead he will say only on loan and the other manager will not accept to take you on loan. Ultimately you may loose that opportunity also.

Advice to Senior Management

After all these negative points mentioned here i still like the company as a brand but my sincere advice to the management is just talk to the developers and take the necessary steps accordingly.

Pros

job protection is pretty good in this company
multi cultural exposure is given at manager and above level in most functions

Cons

work life balance is heavily compromised
company is not growing rapidly and hence there is much more emphasis on cutting costs

Advice to Senior Management

improve training for the ssociates Give them avenues to work in different countries
understand india is very different from europe

Pros

Fast paced environment that allows for employees to take on new duties and tasks. Employees are friendly, easy to get along with. Compensation is about industry average.

Cons

The fast pace environment can lead to "fighting fires" where employees are stuck responding to issues instead of being proactive to prevent issues. Organization is slow and bureaucratic.

Advice to Senior Management

Management needs to do a better job in listening to employees. Some employees are oversubscribed resulting in burnout, add to the workforce to prevent this.

Pros

Good Promotion Process based on achievements
Lots of opportunities to grow and "DO" things
Good Values
Good Work-Life Balance

Cons

Very political (as other consulting firms).
Very Technical - Lacks sometimes the added value/clients benefits beyond system integration.
Too focused on Government contracts

Advice to Senior Management

More structure around processes and add more value to the clients around business benefits of the work delivered. Will need to move towards this direction to differentiate the company from pure players gaining marketshare.

Pros

Capgemini promotes a work/life balance. They also promote learning and networking through classes held in offsite locations usually involving global personnel.

Cons

I agree with previous comments that Capgemini is strong in the US, but in smaller countries, the level of professionalism and effectiveness declines sharply. Far too much emphasism is placed on participation in extracurricular activities and who you know as opposed to what you know. Not enough large scale projects are sold so that younger, less experienced consultants, are left stagnating on the bench because there are fewer opportunites to learn from experience in a project with a mix of competencies.

Advice to Senior Management

Refocus your sales efforts to sell more projects and less individual CVs. By selling larger projects, you can have younger consultants benefiting from working with more experienced consultants. Recognize that some of your consultants were brought in to staff projects, not to sell them.

Pros

Good work-life balance, encourage entrepreneuralism but probably moreso because they do not enforce process as rigourously as the "man=machine" culture experienced at some of its competitors (who will remain nameless!).

Cons

Not really truly global as could still strengthen US presence. But on the whole - very few cons compared to its closest competitors.

Advice to Senior Management

Don't rely on public sector beyond the next elections!

Pros

Good work culture in most of the countries. Excellent employer in some countries like USA, UK, Netherlands, India, Germany. However be careful when working with Capgemini in other countries

Cons

some of the smaller Capgemni entities especially are totally unprofessional and without strong management. Beware if you are working with capgemini in Austria & Eastern Europe. e.x. in Capgemini Austria the management at board level is mostly old E&Y employees who are absolutely incapable of leading the company.Many managers with good relations to the board members are direclty promoted to CEO's for newly formed entities in eastern europe. Overall the Company has grown inorganically in many countries so the quality of the workforce, attitude and work culture is totally different in different parts.

Advice to Senior Management

look at your top leadership in smaller geographies. are they really capable leaders?

Pros

Some very strong consultants with industry expertise. Great amount of collective knowledge across the firm. Very strong consulting presence and reputation in Europe

Cons

North American consulting unit has be realigning constantly over the past 3-4 years. None of the approaches seem to hold, so there is no strong unity or culture. Not good collaboration between business units.

Advice to Senior Management

Get back to the ground level to understand the perspective of those in the trenches. Then truly realign your focus on collaborating with clients, not just pitching collaboration.