McKinsey & Company Reviews in London, UK Area

Pros

- Impact. What you say and do gets implemented and generates real life impact at the highest levels
- Get to work amazingly bright people.

Cons

- It becomes your life. There is absolutely no work-life balance.
- You do better the more you comply with the prototype. Variety of personalities and characters is not encouraged. An example is the uniform code: Dark suit, white shirt.

Pros

Access to top companies
Real responsibility from day 1
Great people to work with
Fantastic mentoring opportunities
Great salary
Career development opportunities are great at McKinsey and also outside of McKinsey if you decide to leave

Cons

Work/life balance is difficult to strike (... but can be done!)
Tight deadlines can be difficult for some people to handle

Advice to Senior Management

Ensure that the best people make it to Partner level instead of those who can just play the political games

Pros

Highly challenging work with the best possible support culture you can imagine. McKinsey is top in its field. Its reputation is self reinforcing consistently attracting the best people and the most interesting challenges to work on.

Cons

This is no soft option. Consulting is a business where the main assets are the people. McKinsey knows how to sweat its assets.

Advice to Senior Management

Look after your lower tenure people. High turnover makes them your best PR engine.

Pros

- money which you will not have time to spend anyway
- Prestige if you are able to stay longer than 3, 4 years
- Hotel and flights reward schemes
- you could learn to "kill before getting killed"

Cons

Your personal life will become your colleagues and manager’s personal life.
Everything you say, the way you move, talk, walk will be under judgment.

On each engagement the partners want to have a list of best performers and worst ones.
Which means that is everyone is super man the y will still want this list.
This will ted to a brutal internal competition, still trying to work for the same client…

The matrix management structure is a Utopia: you’d better blindly follow all the orders from all the levels ABOVE you, if you want to keep your job
One of my colleagues used to filter the “requests for help” he got on his Bberry in the following way:
- if they were people behind his level or same level, he would not answer
- if they were coming at least one level p he would immediately answer

this guy got promoted when he was expected to

You will never have any friends in McKinsey: only colleagues who have not crashed you down yet.

Advice to Senior Management

As long as you earn enough money to buy a Ferrari after 3 months, do not change anything

Pros

- Great training programs
- Opportunities to work with C-level executives
- Decent compensation
- Great brand name

Cons

- Too much travel
- Work life balance
- Difficult to get on projects of your liking without previous background

Advice to Senior Management

- Focus on work life balance
- Provide better choice of projects
- Some way to get on projects with no previous background

Pros

Interesting and varied work. Loads of international opportunities. Very impressive client base, extremely bright colleagues, generally exciting and challenging work

Cons

Extremely long hours. Limited choice over projects (so that at times can end up doing work you are unsuited for). Variable quality of managers.

Advice to Senior Management

Better training for managers so that they truly understand their role (coaching and managing the work), more realistic expectations around deadlines, more flexible working conditions (e.g. time off in lieu following intensive projects)

Pros

Very bright and motivated colleagues- great work ethic
Excellent knowledge development and management
Opportunities for growth if you are completely flexible to travel and kiss work-life balance goodbye
Good training ground... for other jobs!

Cons

Limited choice in projects/sectors, especially as you grow within the firm- saying "no" to a project is discouraged
Operating model (4 days a week at client) is very demanding on lifestyle
Limited transparency on how promotion systems function- marked inconsistency between regions
Tough to make flexi/part-time options work practically

Advice to Senior Management

1. Consistent firm practices across regions
2. Better and honest communication of trends impacting the Firm (e.g. don't mince words - recently, lay-offs driven by the economic downturn have been disguised as accelerated BAU "up or out")

Pros

- Colleagues are all be very bright and from very diverse backgrounds and nationalities and you learn a lot from them
- Topics on which we are working are usually very exciting although in today's environment, it's more about cost cutting and performance transformation which can be much less fun
- Building a set of skills (problem solving, ability to synthesize, crystal clear communication) that should help you throughout your carrer no matter where you end up
- Seems to build a good career accelerator when looking at the various positions colleagues are exiting to
- No strong focus on expenses which means you always fly business, go to good hotels and great restaurants although this also is changing a fair bit since the crisis

Cons

- Lifestyle can be brutal although (at least in the London office), the weekends are usually respected
- Limited control on the staffing, in particular at the begining of your career - eg: not such uncommon to end up working very far from the home office with ~4-5 hrs of plane commute every week or in industry/function that are not relevant to your interest

Advice to Senior Management

-

Pros

As with any consultancy or professional services firm, they offer much more rapid advancemenrt and increase in responsibility than possible in "normal" companies. In addition McKinsey offers the best name recognition and access to clients/future employers

Cons

Lifestyle is always a challenge as a consultant. McKinsey's partnership model makes its operations a complete black box for non-partners (and even for junior partners vs. senior ranks). Current tough economic outlook profoundly affecting how the Firm is run, but probably less than in many other businesses

Advice to Senior Management

Make sure the "through-cycle" rhetoric matches the reality of economic and employee decision-making

Pros

Great opportunities to develop personally through regular and honest feedback from peers, and those working for you as well as those you are working for
Progression can be very speedy (if earned) - a meritocracy
It's a great platform for future careers, both in terms of the experience gained (breadth and quality) and the brand value on a CV
The compensation curve is steep, and this is one of the key reasons for hanging around
Real investment in the people, some really good quality training courses. The Firm does try to get the trainng in quickly and at a high quality

Cons

Hours are long, and can also be unpredictable. Not unusual to cancel dinner/theatre etc last minute
Lots of travel

Advice to Senior Management

Internal mechanics are a bit too opaque - For example I have no idea what the compensation structure for the next levels looks like - how can I plan a mortgage?