Q&A With PA Consulting Employees

Once a year in April. Salary increases in rank are generally modest - big changes happen with promotions to next rank and increase a lot as you move up. PA puts a lot of emphasis on bonus compensation vs. salary.

Definitely my colleagues, who are kind-hearted, dedicated, and brilliant people with a wide range of outside interests.

Very - every project brings a new wrinkle to solve, a new group of people to figure out, and a new internal consulting team on which to sort out team dynamics and the like. It keeps things fresh and interesting.

Like other consulting companies, client workload and travel can be heavy at times. I definitely had stretches where I fell off the map for weeks at a time to meet project commitments. PA is definitely no worse than any other consulting firm on this front.

Happy to do it. I work with great people and get to work on interesting projects.

In a nutshell, I'd say highly motivated, self-managing, high energy, positive outlook, passionate self-starters.

PA is structured around core sectors (e.g. Energy, Defense and Security) and secondarily around service areas (e.g Business Intelligence & Analytics, Business Transformation...). Go on website to understand the range here and identify the areas where you can contribute most immediately and state on application that you are targeting those practice areas.

People are generally quite happy I think.

Everyone can be a shareholder

Open space concept with mostly hot desks

PA is similar to other firms in this regard by being very male and white at the most senior levels and becoming more gender and racially/ethnically diverse as you go down the ranks. Diversity generally is a high focus area for PA and as an example, in my practice area, half the new joiners this season were POC and a majority were female.

PA Consulting is a great place to work with an excellent team of people. I'm coming up on my 25th anniversary and never believed that I would be with the same firm for this period of time. There are only two thing that have bugged me on and off over the years. The first is how "UK centric" things can feel at times. The bulk of staff are in the UK, with headquarters in London. UK management style is a bit more directive and sometimes punitive compared with US firms that I know. It comes through in the style of communication and in policy choice. I've learned now to ignore it and not get upset about such things, but it took a while to get there! The second is that PA is very cost conscious. Since we are all shareholders, this does flow through to us in the share price down the line but there are probably some investments that would make sense -- like giving people slightly more souped up laptops that while more costly up front also increase consultant productivity.