KPMG Reviews in Dallas-Fort Worth, TX Area

Pros

Good employment environment, opportunity for advancement, opportunity for business travel. KPMG has leading global companies as its clients. It is great to work on real business issues for major clients. KPMG also provides excellent training opportunities. The firm feels like a good meritocracy, where your effort is recognized and rewarded. Also, the company supports diversity initiatives and has a global rotation program so you can get experience in different business communities around the world.

Cons

Performance expectations are very high, time demands are high. Clients have high expectations for our work, and it often means that we have to put in extra hours on the evenings/weekends.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep doing a good job of navigating this difficult economy! I think that employee satisfaction is good, but should be a focus for future strategy. More structured feedback on job performance would be good.

Pros

It gives one an opportunity to network with some of the brightest people in the industry. The company is large, so there are also good clients that one can work on. Another advantage of its size is the number of offices that KPMG has, so one can try to internally transfer anywhere in the world. The benefits are also good, such as 25 days off, generous 401k matching contributions, and decent salary. Many of the partners are also very relaxed and calm. I would say most of the managers are as well, but there are some that tend to be uptight.

Cons

It is easy to be pigeon holed into an industry. It mostly depends on which service line that one joins, as well as the location of the office that he/she joins. For example, in the NE offices, employees work mostly on financial firms, in SF and SV, the clients are mostly technology related, and in the SW, it is mostly energy. If one doesn't like the industries that his/her office specializes in, it can be difficult to enjoy ones work. Also, because it is such a big company, there are some less than smart people that are able to squeeze through the cracks and gain employement.

Advice to Senior Management

Encourage productivity. Don't berate staff when they make mistakes, and they will tend to remember that and respect you more, thus, work harder for you.

Pros

The peolpe. Everone that I worked with was friendly and helpful.

Cons

Not compendsated for overtime. The hours can sometimes be unfair.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep better contact with your employees.

Pros

BRAND, Flexibility, Opportunities, Career progress

Cons

Heard they may not pay great

Advice to Senior Management

Trust employee too not just managers. Accept Critisism

Pros

Great experience in the accounting profession.

Cons

The long hours during busy season.

Advice to Senior Management

They need to do a better job of listening to their employees and not just follow the competition.

Pros

25 Days Vacation
The relationship with upper management is really good. You get feedback on a regular basis from many different managers at different levels.
The firm has an emphasis on work life balance. They allow you to be flexible with work schedules as long as you still get your work finished.
KPMG encourages and allows for rotations to different places around the world.
KPMG also has many short term travel opportunities that you can encounter when working at all levels of the organization.

Cons

Longer work weeks than you will find in "industry", but the same as other big 4.
Sometimes you can look back and find that your month was crazy traveling all over the place, but it does not seem bad if you are ok with a changing environment.

Advice to Senior Management

They do a great job.

Pros

Good place to start a career. Firm has excellent benefits. Most of senior management are easily accessible and act promptly on individual concerns.

Cons

Long hours will be required on regular basis which tends to affect work/life balance. There is a heavy management oversight if employees do not charge 50 hours per week of billable time. There were recent lay-offs which were not formally communicated which tends to create a lot of speculation among the employees. All work papers are still in hard copy format, however, the firm is slowly moving towards electronic format. This transition will be completed next year.

Advice to Senior Management

Provide more and open communication in the areas of work schedule and performance review feedback. Recommend additional team building events as the number of events have been reduced in recent months/year.

Pros

KPMG offers the highest time off in the industry: 25 paid personal days a year. Taking them is not only possible, it's encouraged.

Cons

Managment provides a "sink or swim" attitude to Staff's learning and career progression. If you can make it on your own, you will. If you can't, you'll be gently steered toward "someplace that is a better fit for you".

Advice to Senior Management

If you're not going to develop people once they're in the door, do a better job of weeding them out before you hire. That turn-over has got to be expensive.

Pros

5 weeks vacation, pension plan, great co-workers at the associate and senior associate level, good work/life balance, independence at clients, very little micro-management, good benefits overall

Cons

Unclear promotion structure, unbalanced staff levels, recent layoffs, unclear performance rating, often no support from Performance/Engagement Managers, tendency for condescending attitudes among senior management towards staff, promotions based on favortism and perception vs. reality and experience

Advice to Senior Management

More awareness of staff level competencies and if unclear get more involved.

Pros

Career advancement is huge. KPMG supplies great training to employees. Investing tons of time into detailed trainings that are critical to your success in the field. Also they allow you to get plenty of exposure across a broad industry. The applications and various policies you get to see early on give you a firm foundation for examining best practices. It won't take long for you to be able to pick up concepts that fortune 500 companies struggle with and the experience of talking with CFOs and other management with far more industry experience and advising them on a course of action is invaluable.

Cons

The main downside is a lack of community can happen. Advisory will constantly be out at the client site. This allows you to get a good sense of team work with a few people, but you can be with the firm for years and still not meet with peers who were hired with you because employees are so dispursed. There is always the dredded busy season which seems somewhat tame, but even during busy season the most you are expected to work is around 50 hours a week.

Higher education is not as prized at KPMG. Many managers do not have masters degrees and such as experience is prized much more than degrees. So those with years of masters degrees and doctorates and expect to make the same as new hires with a bachelor's degree.

Advice to Senior Management

Management does a good job balancing their workload and getting to talk with the regular employees. They have to take on a lot of tough engagements and then balance other responsibilities with personnel. This can really be tiring and managers often look quite harassed. But in the end they are all doing their level best to provide as much feedback and help they can to each of their engagements.