Deloitte Reviews in Calgary, AB Area

Pros

There is endless learning and growth opportunity, they will pay for your education and they will allow you to work a reduced work week if you are attending school. The people are brilliant. Overtime is paid either in time in lieu or time and a half. They offer extended maternity leave and the option to go back part time if you aren’t ready to go back to work full time after leave.

Cons

You will be expected to carry a very heavy work load. Salary increases are done once/year and are insignificant. Going above and beyond is expected, you are rarely be recognized for it. Promotions are extremely rare for Administrative positions

Advice to Senior Management

You are in the business of giving companies staff retention advice, evaluate yourself!

Pros

Great experience from beginning to end, was treated very well and given the ability to learn on the fly by asking questions and speaking with my coach and 2nd and 3rd year employees.

Cons

Felt like a number and literally had an ID number that was something like 458924823742389. Made me feel insignificant while staring at my computer in my cubicle.

Advice to Senior Management

You guys are great, always be respectful to the learning curve and different level of abilities of your entry level workers.

Pros

- knowledge sharing
- lots of variety
- opportunity to learn

Cons

- Senior Management are not leaders - have no people skills - worse I have ever worked for
- Very demanding - no work life balance
- They are loosing alot of people due to poor leadership
- Alot of politics - which had negative impacts on what was trying to get done. Internal struggles in management
- Very competitive environment - no support for one another
- Saw alot being charged to clients for work done by incompetent, unskilled, junior people

Advice to Senior Management

You are loosing the good people and keeping the ones who are the problem

Pros

- great place to work for, talented people around, good and diversified experience, learn a lot, advacement opportunities, skills improved

Cons

- sometimes workload is a lot

Advice to Senior Management

- detailed attention towards all levels

Pros

Great people, friendly place. If you are a new grad it's a great place to build a resume and get some good work experience. If you are an "experienced professional" it may be a disappointment.

Cons

Deloitte has no process for streaming the careers of experienced professionals who are new to consulting. As an accounting firm, they largely operate on the apprentice model and so you are thrown in with the heap of new hires. Even if you have 20+ years of professional experience at a senior managment level, you'll be treated the same as a 22 year old new graduate fresh from an MBA program.
The work is the same and you might find your skills aren't fully utilized as you'll end up doing a lot of grunt work that in industry would be done by an experienced executive assistant - but these supports are only available to partners, not consultants so you can expect to spend hours on end doing secretarial work (even though the pay isn't very good, you are still paid too much to collate documents - not good business sense in my opinion.)

Also there is a lot of lip service to work life balance, but the performance metrics are all on billable hours. It's how much you do (or bill in this case) that drives your evaluation, rather than the quality of the work. If anyone tries to tell you that anything more than billable hours are considered in measuring your value to the firm, don't believe them for one minute!

 If travel is involved, that time isn't billable and even though you are asked to document it, not one hour is considered in assessing your performance. I billed above normal hours, but ended up spending almost 25 hours in travelling time per week for which I didn't get credit and was done on my own time. You can't really take time back in lieu because then your billable hours will be compromised.

Also during the time I was there, there were issues with leadership (partners). They are highly competitive with each other and many times you feel like a commodity. Also since the track to partner is generally on billable hours, many who reach this level are there simply because they are good at sales versus people management.

There was high turnover during the time I was there but management just normalized it rather than asking why.

Advice to Senior Management

A discrete onboarding process for experienced professionals.
Leadership attributes should be considered when promoting people. Not just billable hours.

Turnover is expensive and a symptom of other problems. Exit interviews should be routine and the firm might not only learn how to do things better, but might be more profitable for the partners.

Pros

Great knowledge sharing, fantastic people

Cons

Lack of oppotunties is serious at higher levels, due to competive nature (up or out), it is sometimes hard to find people to back you in your corner

Advice to Senior Management

Sharing the resources across Canada as it is supposed to be a "national" organization not regional

Pros

- Its a place to get your CA designation and thats about the only good thing that it has to offer

Cons

- Long work hours
- Poor pay
- Very poor performance evaluations
- Boring repetitive work
- People in charge of performance evaluations rarely if ever see the way you actually work in the field
- at the AGM they said they are making higher profits then ever before, yet costs are being cut everywhere, mostly for the junior positions
- The Deloitte name is getting to be viewed more and more poorly in the Calgary area

Advice to Senior Management

- Treat us like human beings