Pros
Ultimately, CIL is a very good place to start a career, with healthy exit opportunities. There is a culture of constant feedback, it is a great place to develop useful skills for a corporate career, such as slide design, analytics (excel), and critical thinking / storytelling. Employees are generally pretty engaged in the subject matter, and there is a good culture of healthy debate. There is good exposure to private equity/M&A (great exposure for graduates, if that is what you are looking for). People are generally pretty friendly, I would describe people as curious and open. Employees really care about the quality of work. There are a lot of great people working at this firm. There are also good opportunities to involve yourself in any horizontal business functions (albeit time spent on this is on top of your project work). As the firm has grown quickly it had some problems ensuring that ops was up to speed. The firm made some new hires in ops recently so that seems to be in a good place now.
Cons
The working hours are long and unpredictable. You may be told on Monday that your last project, which you have been reading up on for a week, has been cancelled, and you will be joining a 'sprint' project for the next 2 weeks (i.e. cancel all your plans and throw your reading in the bin). This is a consequence of the nature of the work. Salary is a little lower than at other consulting firms, which is seemingly justified by working less / having a good culture. Often, this 'trade-off' doesn't quite materialise, and you will find yourself at the mercy of investor timelines / whatever work the firm has managed to sell. TOIL (Time off in Lieu) is sold as a key mitigating factor, but this is discretionary and rarely materialises, and does not come close to compensating for hours worked (and if it does it never reflects the hours put in - you might work to 1am for 8 nights and get 1 day off, for example). The firm seems to have it's head in the sand about a few things: Employees and management sing laurels about the culture, and how nice everyone is. I would disagree - while there are a lot of lovely people, there is a bit of an 'old boys club' mentality (which I think management is aware of and is trying to change - there are some fantastic D&I efforts at the moment, mostly propelled by junior staff). You will be told that the firm is 'non-hierarchical' - this is not true. Senior staff can throw their weight around in the office (not all choose to, but some do) in ways that would get junior staff into a lot of trouble. There are some very cliquey circles (particularly around mid-senior management), that can make socialising with established employees difficult / uncomfortable for new joiners (I have heard this from several people). The environment is very gossipy; there are a lot of eyes in the office. The senior half of the firm is aware of all feedback/progress of all of the junior half of the firm. There can be a blame culture in review processes. The quality of middle management varies significantly (CIL had a void in this area not too long ago, so perhaps some promotions were rushed). There is little to no say as far as how you might specialise. Ultimately, if a project comes in when you are free, you will be staffed on it. The firm still seems to believe (or chooses to believe) that analysts have a choice - they don't. You will be told to network upwards to specialise - but this rarely translates into self-determinism. Often, you will be staffed on a project as you worked on a similar project previously. Most people who specialise do so out of happenstance. Some analysts find themselves doing several projects in one industry that they do not want to specialise in. There is a very low level of client interaction for juniors. A lot of the work is 'cookie cutter'. This doesn't necessarily mean that it's a bad learning experience, but a lot of the work is long and monotonous. You may spend a month cold calling, or tying up/proofing call transcripts. Currently, management's top priority is to deliver excellent client work. Employee well-being is a priority, but very much secondary.