Pros
- Training: You get 80 Hrs. Minimum training allowance per year. This is a minimum, not maximum. Avanade provides access to great training tools, like books24x7 and pluralsight. there is more training than you can consume in your career lifetime. Most of this is SELF-study! - Enterprise Clients - You will be working with some of the best names out there. When you look back at your CV in a few years time, it will be amazing! - Travel: You will be travelling most of the time but WELL looked after. Staying in the best accomodations with decent daily allowances to spend and per diems. Better than most other consultancies. - Comms: Open communication on company news and events. - Gadget allowance: You get £1900 / year to buy tech toys or work-life balance related items. If you are thinking of joining this place - Do it if you have less than 5 yrs experience OR never worked in Large/Enterprise projects to get great names on your CV. If you are already experienced, it will be a frustrating ride.
Cons
- Career Management: You will be assigned a career manager as a matter of luck when you first join. Your career at Avanade will shape entirely based on this relationship.The manager is not changeable even if you have issues; you are expected to resolve them between the two of you. Many promotions are based on secret deals & fabrication (like employess threatening to leave with offer letters in hand) while hard working employees will be given a random reason & will be kept wondering for years, what they did wrong. You will not succeed here if you are NOT a self promoter. You are also laddered against your colleagues, so you will find the ones you are helping are actually working in competition with you; often bad mouthing you scared you will be promoted and not them. - Work/Life balance: If you don't push it you will lose it. Having Accenture as parent means they will try to bully you into their work culture which often means sitting down on client sites till late to show you are committed (whether you are doing something productive or not, don't matter). - Roles: Avanade depends almost entirely on Accenture for projects. As such a lot of roles you will be asked to do will be 'filler' roles which 'may' have a tech element that Accenture would make money on. You will end up doing roles with no alignment to your specialities and a year later you will be told you didn't do a project in your speciality so no promotion or growth. This will happen year after year if you are not careful. Though you may see great clients on your CV, you will also look back and regret the roles you did as many roles you will not take up if you were looking for a job independently. They care about 'chargeabiliy'; not your career. Take roles with Caution! - Overall Experience: As per the point above, you will find 23 years old Accenture industry experts managing Avanade experienced hires with almost 23 years of experience. They will do best to keep you shielded from the client as they are 'trained' in corporate talk by Accenture. They produce processes, procedures, presentations & do the client engagement. You will do the actual work as the hidden tech monkeys! - Microsoft/Accenture: Your loyalty lies only to learn Microsoft. But in reality you will only work on technologies that Accenture make money on, so your loyalty in turn lies wiith Accenture. Relationship with Microsoft is just a con, they mostly don't work alongside Avanade due to obviously MCS being in direct competition with Avanade! - Company Direction/Hires: It changes more often than the colour of pants I wear. They recently got rid of a lot of founding members and senior employees, which to me seems like a suicide mission. They used to hire only experienced Microsoft geeks and was a place where MVPs had pride. I have seen all sorts from great to really unbelievable silly people you would think will be hired by such a prestigious organisation (once great).