PricewaterhouseCoopers Reviews in Dallas-Fort Worth, TX Area

Pros

The people are outstanding. The clients are dynamic and provide opportunities to create cutting edge solutions and delivery. There is not cookie cutter approach to promotion, it is truly based on each person's ability to grow and perform.

Cons

In such a high performing environment it drives your hours. You have to own the work life balance area and understand that to continue to promote it will be tilted to the work side.

Pros

Great benefits and opportunities to expand your knowledge with the extensive network of trainings and other information to expand their accounting knowledge.

Cons

The environment isn't always healthy depending on your team, some people do not believe in working in a team atmosphere, so they will do their best to undermine the rest of their team.

Advice to Senior Management

Emphasize the importance of working in teams and not as individuals.

Pros

Exceptionally bright people, wonderful clients, and exposure you wouldn't get elsewhere. PwC is clearly the place to work and experience an opportunity of a lifetime.

Cons

Client service can be difficult to plan as the client's schedule is very difficult to manage at times. Other issues include travel.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to take the pulse of the people and consider whether change is always good. Sometimes change for the sake of change is not appropriate.

Pros

Opportunity to grow and increase network

Cons

Recruiting process for new candidates needs to improve. Response time is bad.

Pros

You hold the keys to your job with PwC. You get out of it what you put into it. Their is room for growth within the company and they encourage continuted learning.

Cons

They expect everyone they hire to be exceptional so to stand out you must really go out of the way. Showmanship, appearances, and perception are all important for you to stand out. The company is large and often your job duties are not cut and dry. There is only so much room to grow upwards and you have to have an accrediation (CPA, PMP, MBA, MCTS, etc...) to advance beyond Senior Associate.

Advice to Senior Management

Please look for the most effective utilization of your employees. Furthermore, continue to expand team-buliding exercices and heed the advice of Focus Groups.

Pros

good compensation package including benefits and perks.
good chances of promotions and growth within the company.
quality of work and clients is very good.

Cons

not an extremely good work-life balance due to long hours of work.

Advice to Senior Management

N/A

Pros

The experience you get at PwC is great, along with a high level of responsibility that is expected of you. Career progression is good, although there is a significant backlog of people waiting to get promoted to partner, which jams up the pipe for everyone down the line.

Cons

Work/life balance is a joke, as is "busy season." The trend nowadays is to try and staff from other lines of service, which results in individuals working "busy season" of 50 - 60 hrs/wk for 6 to 9 months of the year. The pay for this type of work is not comparable to what you could get at another job working 40 hours a week. While the experience is great, the sacrifices are plenty.

The firm also cut back significantly on some of the more lavish perks that we used to enjoy, such as paid-for lunches and happy hours. There is not a good strategy for growing the practices or for cross-training employees. A significant amount of work is on-the-job training, which is not the best when we're sometimes expected to be the experts.

Advice to Senior Management

Treat your people like your most valuable assets, not like machines on an assembly line. If you truly value your employees, help them make a career out of their time with PwC, rather than burning them out and giving them every reason to leave.

Pros

Great place to start your career, because you learn a lot about how companies work. Good vacation policy and unlimited sick days. Decent benefits.

Cons

They talk about work like balance all the time, but there is very little life balance. Because of all high turnover, we are constantly understaffed. Constantly overworked, with a salary that does not compensate.

Advice to Senior Management

Turnover might not be quite as high if you compensated top performers better.

Pros

At a very macro level, all Big 4 firms perform the same services. Therefore, the differentiator has to be the people. The people on my project teams have historically been very intelligent, driven, and knowledgeable on both process and technical matters. The firm's expertise in Advisory, Audit, and Tax has led to successful, cross-functional projects and our name has allowed us to win large projects across the US and world. The review process, whose end-game rating may at times be questionable, is very through and automated to allow for high frequency feedback. My time here has allowed me to be ready to succeed in other fields or companies.

Cons

Since joining the Advisory Group, I feel like our high level strategy changes in a very big way each year, including the Firm leadership. Our recent expansions into higher level strategy and implementations projects have not been filled internally, rather through multiple acquisitions and whose integrations have been handled interestingly. This, along with a shortage of technical, not "consulting" training, has led to Managers and above with a broad knowledge of products and experience, but Seniors and Associates with only on-the-job training while trying to take on bigger pieces of the project. Other pieces are simply outsourced to boutique technical firms that then leave after the project is finished. There also seems to be a timidness to remove weaker talent, but an aggressiveness to remove great resources who are paid too much.

Advice to Senior Management

Focus on a consistent approach to grading employees during and after the annual review process, invest in more technical training for Associates and Seniors, re-evaluate individual groups business models rather than the whole firm, re-evaluate salary bands for more uniformity within and in the market.

Pros

-Client exposure and experience
-Quality of colleagues
-Knowledge Sharing/Training Material
-Amount of vacation
-Flexibility in work

Cons

-Lots of hours/overtime
-Lots of travel
-Internal competition

Advice to Senior Management

-Provide better strategic direction
-Be honest about decisions (layoffs, salary freezes)
-Don't worry so much about fitting in the market as much as leading the market