Pros
- Good social culture. - High quality projects. - Good opportunities for working overseas within the Asia Pacific region. - No shortage of responsibility if you are keen and able to deliver. - Very risk adverse company, good if you are wanting to ride out a recession.
Cons
- Very low base salary compared to market rate, prepare to be paid around 15% less than your base market salary in current market conditions. Average annual pay rise at around 3-3.5% irrespective of financial targets being met or not. - Dresses up renumeration packages with other benefits to pad it out. No way to negotiate for more base salary if you do not need to draw down any of those benefits. - I have never seen a company so happy to have such a small profit margin. The financial reviews will be up beat and the pats on the back will be huge, but your pay rise will be just as disappointing. - You will get a lot of pressure to win work and deliver under budget but somehow when that money goes into the pot a tiny amount comes back out, there is a colossal amount of overheads that you can't do anything about. - A bit of an old boys club, career prospects based on who you know rather than your ability. Person assessing your ultimate pay rises is so far up the chain, you are just a number to them. - Career progression is not transparent at all, you can be doing a job higher up the food chain for years before being promoted to it. You will be told that technical ability and delivery are viable career paths but nobody explains that unless you have market contacts to bring in work you won't be going anywhere fast no matter how good you are at design or project delivery. - Be VERY cautious when accepting contracts with bonuses, make sure to ask all the questions like when is this paid out? How much is paid out if I only start X months before the next bonus payout? How is it assessed? Because in all the years I have worked there, never has the bonus been paid out at 100%. It is half based on group wide financial performance so one of the countries is always underperforming thus justifying a cut to your bonus. - Antiquated employee owned share model, sold as the ultimate in employee reward but actually amounts to you purchasing a non liquid asset that has no better dividend return than any other publicly listed shares from another consultancy. You may be able to build up enough shares over a 40 year career in the same company for them to pay handsomely but this model out of line with the current job and financial market in the real world.
