Mostly operations consulting, highly political, still a good firm o start the career. - Manager - Strategy and Operations Deloitte Employee Review

3.0
7 May 2009
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Nice place to start the career (post MBA). Staying at Deloitte for a few years helps you master the politics of consulting and client relationship management. Deloitte also works in a lot of industries and has a wide list of service offerings (except true strategy, especially growth strategy), which givens everyone an opportunity to work on projects within their area of interest - you do need to align yourself to the right partner. Work is mostly easy for any bright guy - you may have to pretend that you are working hard by staying at client site till late. Perks are good, vacation time manager onwards is 4.5 weeks / annual - Great.

Cons

There is hardly any true strategy work (Less than 20%), mostly its operations consulting, where any average management professional can get the job done - so what makes the difference between success and failure is politics and knowing the right partners - suck it up. Be prepared to spend 70% of your time in making changed to the presentation deck based on personal taste of every partner/ sr. manager/ director involved in the project. The time spend on analysis and developing a solution is hardly 20-30% of the whole time - rest is politics management, validation and meaningless changed to slides. BTW: the firm still does not have a standard presentation format. The firm is careless in hiring more than needed staff in good times and panicking and firing significant chunks during bad times. People are let go off - without merit analysis - its mainly politics (for above average performers). There is no single culture or intellectual level - IT side of things makes a lot of money for the company. however their mindset is completely different from Strategy & operations consulting people - that creates a lot of conflict.

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5.0
22 Mar 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Lots of growing and leaning opportunities to be a accounting and financial professional. Great professional network building internally as well as externally

Cons

Sometimes it's hard to balance the work and the personal life especially during the busy season.

5.0
4 Aug 2014
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

These folks know exactly what they are doing. They set high standards, and consistently deliver. Their project expectations and planning is excellent. The top level management folks are extremely smart and have a great sense of vision and planning. If you go to company social events (which are very frequent by the way), it is quite easy to have conversations with upper management people (Partners). Deloitte's hiring pattern is very consistent. For the young starters, they hire smart, well spoken, and subtly aggressive candidates. They have excellent training and knowledge management. They have a well oiled and empowered HR and Tech Support group. Things get done pretty fast. Their paid time off program is really great, and pretty straight forward. No messing about. They have a big social responsibility program that encourages volunteering. It also presents a great opportunity for youngsters to take event organizing responsibilities. This can be very very useful. Once, I volunteered for an event where we painted rooms for an orphanage center. There was a young guy who did the organizing. We were 10-12 people, with 3 senior executives actually doing paintwork. Quite unique. I have personally seen that Deloitte's top talents tend to start young, spend a 3-4 years, then take a hiatus to pursue a Graduate Degree (typically an MBA). The firm sometimes re-hires these consultants after their MBA with generous financial incentives. They offer much better packages to folks graduating from top universities. Sometimes they can offer huge joining bonuses. I worked in the IT consulting division.They tend to get top-end projects. On projects, the average age seems pretty low. A lot of 20-somethings, then there are a handful of 30-40 year old people and some senior Management folks. Beginner salaries can be a bit low. (which is expected. It takes some time to build credibility in the Consulting business) Overall, a great place to start your professional career. If you pay attention, you will get seasoned very quickly.

Cons

Work-life balance can become poor, especially during tight project timelines (This is expected in the Consulting Business). The employees have a significant amount of "firm-internal" training and knowledge contribution tasks. There are annual goal expectations. It can get tedious if you continuously work on high demand projects. There is intense competition, especially during targeted promotion/milestone years. There can be some backstabbing. It's part of the experience. It is not as bad as it sounds, and seems manageable. A lot of times, being young and inexperienced has it's flaws. The company has a simple way of seasoning consultants. They get pushed into high pressure situations, and they learn fast, and quickly start managing their own work. But they tend to be blind towards intricate details, especially in complicated IT product implementations. This has an interesting effect. If someone is able to do the hands-on work, everyone else tries to piggy-back on that person for their actual work. The hands-on guy gets overwhelmed, and others try to use him/her as a key resource. -- I personally went through a crunch project, and found a number of people "managing expectations" (piggy backing), while a handful of people actually knew the end-to-end solution and did the hands-on work. This created a lot more work and mental anguish than needed. Because of the expressed pressure, the hands-on guys have a hard time building and growing their reputation and subsequent performance evaluation rating. This also affects the project execution timelines. IMPORTANT: Make sure you thoroughly read through your employment agreement and understand the implications. In recent years, they have started hiring for specific projects ONLY. This falls under a particular "AMS service line". In this case, if your assigned project gets into a problem, you are exposed to the risk of employment termination. Their HR and Management are very helpful, and they will try to get you a new project. But there are several constraints like location, your skills, and limited time. I went through this, and it was somewhat unnerving. This was one of the reasons I ended up leaving the company.

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