Pros

Good opportunities to work with government at a senior level. Graduates and midlevel consultants are mostly very competent and ambitious. A place where you can reasonably build a long term consulting career if you work hard - no "up or out" approach. Reasonable in house training opportunities and a few nice benefits - sabbaticals, option to purchase additional annual leave, travel allowance for principal consultants and above. Bonuses can be very good if you join the right practice. Also, in the right practice in London, there is generally less travel than with competitors.

Cons

Senior partners can come across as "old fashioned" and not as contemporary. This is largely due to the firm's history of hiring ex-civil servants to senior positions. Although it helps with networking and sales, it often leads to less innovative approaches to projects and a highly risk averse culture. The whole corporate culture feels like being back in the public sector.

The longstanding practice based model works in London, but causes huge problems in the smaller offices. Stories of 2 PA practices bidding against each other for the same piece of work are not uncommon.

PA advertises itself as a "global firm" but this is a fallacy. It's history of trying to operate in geographies outside of the UK and Scandanavia, especially the Middle East and Australia has been fraught with problems. Centralised corporate control does not provide enough local autonomy to allow the business to develop. Key decision makers at the London headquarters seem to have little understanding of the particular nuances of different local business practices making PA less competitive in these markets. Local HR policies in these international geographies can also be substandard compared with competitors - this frustrates employees transferring to these regions. If you want an international career - don't even contemplate joining PA.

Finally, PA's brand is built mostly on project management, which can make some jobs feel more like being a temp than a consultant. Fewer opportunities for intellectually challenging strategic work than with competitors.

Advice to Senior Management

A tough decision needs to be made about whether PA wants to largely remain a public sector consulting firm for the UK and Denmark or whether it wants to become a truly "global firm' successfully growing and competing in new markets. It will need to take more risk and decentralise in order to achieve this.