Analysts and consultants with capabilities, drive and skill will not find any reason to utilise the afore-mentioned attributes. Few bonuses are payed to consultants and analysts, although certain bonuses based on specific conditions are penned into most employee contracts. However the chances of most of these conditions being met by the company are about as high as the chances that this author will win “American Idol”, so for the sake of this article one can consider bonuses to be non-existent. Staff have no incentive to deliver quality work, and more often than not, the work produced is endemically below industry standards, and sadly, far below client expectations. Even more sadly (depending on your point of view) management has come to accept this sub-standard level of quality. Consequently no concrete steps are put in place to correct this issue, resulting in the low quality of consulting work being joked about ad nauseum by staff in the company.
Few competent senior managers are present. Most senior appointments are drawn from the ranks of current staff, which seriously reduces the professionalism of the management as few, if any, have management experience in any proper professional organisation. Unfortunately not only does this strangle the growth of the organisation, it also results in the best and brightest mid- to senior-level analysts and consultants fleeing the company. This generally happens once they realise that demonstrating hard work and skill will not result in promotions to positions of responsibility due to the presence of entrenched management. The company has recently been battered by the resignations of capable mid-tier staff members, putting even further stress and strain on the remaining staff.
Training is non-existent and far below the standard expected of a consulting firm. Training often consists of throwing staff, unguided by senior management, into projects where they have little knowledge or expertise and expecting them to figure out what to do. While this might, from a perverse survival-of-the-fittest point of view, make sense, it cannot really be called training.
The poor quality of senior management does not provide much opportunity for mentoring, although very junior staff may still find the occasional mentor in the company to learn from.
