PA Consulting Reviews

Pros

- Excellent quality of colleagues at the Principal Consultant rank
 - Opportunity to shape your own destiny
 - Relative control over your work/life balance

Cons

- No role models at senior levels - Partner group exhibits selfish behaviors, is not performing in the marketplace, and lacks any diversity in gender or ethnicity
 - PA's most valuable asset is its people, however they are often treated as commodity resources without thought to the person's personal and professional needs
 - Widespread lack of motivation and concern over the future of PA in the US

Advice to Senior Management

- Invest in real line management to allow you to build up relationships with your people
 - Enforce performance management at the Partner level
 - Introduce a communications plan to your people which should include details on the US strategy
 - Develop clear target accounts in the US, rather than the scattergun approach currently exhibited by many Partners

Pros

* reasonable work/life balance
* nice people
* wide range of oopportunities (if you can get on to the jobs)
* open and accessible senior staff

Cons

* Low pay
* Arcance bonus structure
* performance only based on utlisation - this is hard to control at junior levels
* lack of interesting jobs
* lack of interesting private sector clients
* heavily political environment
* lack of vision and leadership from senior management
* poor management throughout organisation
* over-reliance on public sector - huge risk currently

Advice to Senior Management

Invest some money in people and landing good clients.

Pros

Transparency into the company's financials
Employee-owned
Profit-sharing

Cons

Variable quality of personnel management

Advice to Senior Management

Junior ranks don't have control over their utilization and shouldn't be punished for not having enough of it.

Pros

1. Opportunity to progress at your own pace

2. It's a small company with the potential to get noticed and take on extra responsibility quickly

3. PA is fair and rewards well for good performance

Cons

1. You have to be flexible and wear many hats

2. Expectation of travel

3. Team spirit is not what it used to be as the recession continues to bite

Advice to Senior Management

Take time to motivate junior staff

Pros

PA Consulting is an employee owned company albeit 1 person is said to own half of the company shares. Most of the consulting staff have impressive track records of delivering complex work and there's a good proportion of staff with line roles experience in industry / the public sector.

People are friendly and most practices are good places to work on an individual level.

Cons

There is a paucity of leadership within the company with neither the COO or CEO able to articulate a clear direction / strategy to staff, ostensibly because the biggest single shareholder (the chairman) won't accept the need to change the firm's direction.

The number of consulting staff has shrunk markedly over the last couple of years - the rate of staff leaving appears to be getting worse, not better.

PA doesn't pay particularly well - historically this has been offset by bonuses but this year (2010) that's not been the case. The benefits package is amongst the worst in the industry with only 23 days annual leave of which 3 has to be used over xmas.

The thing that makes PA a poor choice for a career at present is the fact the firm appears to be in limbo - staff don't have any confidence in the chairman and the CEO and COO can't really lead or be bold until the chairman departs. This is reflected in the poor rating of the chairman by staff who have reviewed the firm on this website - a crude comparison with PA's competitors shows that their leaders are rated more highly by staff.

Advice to Senior Management

do something quickly or there will soon be more admin staff than consultants.

Pros

Innovative, client facing strategic consulting opportunities
Ability to work on large and complex assignments
Strong reputation within the market place
Genuine high bonus reward model

Cons

Overall compensation package
Low morale in some areas of the business

Advice to Senior Management

To review the overall compensation structure to attract top talent

Pros

Great opportunities to work on a variety of projects
Flexible holiday system whereby you can purchase additional holiday
All staff are friendly and eager to help

Cons

Base salary is low compared to competitors
Only 23 days holiday
Utilisation target is only achievable if projects are available
Annual bonus and promotion directly linked to utilisation

Advice to Senior Management

Operating staff should not be penalised on missing their utilisation target since it is usually beyond their control. The measurement of staff should not be heavily skewed to utilisation for this reason.

Pros

Entrepreneurial environment; you can do pretty much anything you want to do in terms of focus - the challenge will be for generalists trying to find their "brand" or niche
Colleagues are for the most part collaborative
Great opportunities to learn

Cons

Still very much a British company. Not enough American leadership in the US.
Could do more marketing to get the company's name out
Consultants have so many responsibilities it is easy to take on too much

Advice to Senior Management

No advice

Pros

Interacted with amazing people at Consultant analyst, consultant and principal consultant level. The international element of the work force makes it a wonderful place to be.

Initial feeling is of a welcoming, flexible, innovative firm.

Great learning opportunities

Cons

Very pervasive 'pesonal networks' attitude. Internal job market requires one to 'become liked' by those who are in charge. This is not necessarily correlated to ability or productivity. It also makes it difficult for new entrants as they need to break into the established networks.

Direct and indirect bullying is common across the hierarchy but especially at the Consultant and above level.

Politics (links with 'personal networks' above) are often very nasty. One needs to be careful what to say, when and how. Politics are of course part of every organisation but the degree to which they rule PA Consulting's employee life is quite bad.

Divisions and sub-cultures: Depending on the team, the perception of PA's culture will differ. Some teams are open, welcoming, constructive, information sharing, supportive. Others are militaristic, autocratic, need to know basis, unconstructive. It is up to luck where one finds themselves.

Considerable % of employees are ex military personnel / officers. That is not a negative per se. What is damaging is the carry-over of military style politics and attitudes.

Advice to Senior Management

Recognise and deal with cultural disparity.
Recognise that conflicting political agendas at Managing consultant level and above lead to work duplication and even conflicts.
Help people feel less threatened by buyllying.
Help those who bully in changing their behaviour.
Introduce measures that help new employees with finding projects (utilisation)
Foster openness and inclusion vs. exclusion and favouritism

Pros

Small firm culture in the the US which makes it easy to network with in the company and find projects in areas you want to work in.

Cons

Low brand equity which makes it very hard to do business development which is needed to move up the ranks.

Advice to Senior Management

Need to attract US based talent and leaders if you really want to be successful in the US rather than moving folks from UK!