Since the Mastercard acquisition, everything has gone rapidly downhill: benefits, perks, travel policy, culture, core company vision, employee development, etc. The Mastercard integration has been full of non-transparent policy changes, reduction in unique APT culture, bureaucracy, etc., with senior APT leadership reluctant to do anything to counteract this. The health insurance policy used to be excellent and completely covered by APT. Now, there are 3 poor high deductible plans to choose from. Many people within APT are unsure of what their roles might look like in the future due to Mastercard’s ability to do whatever it wants. Many of APT’s best employees have left for other opportunities in the last few years post-acquisition, and rightly so.
While APT markets the role as strategy consulting, it is not. While there are some elements of the job that involve strategic thinking, much of your time will be spent debugging things in the software. Many things are driven by the software and what it’s capable of, which stifles a lot of creative thinking and results in projects that follow a relatively cookie cutter approach. You’re also interacting with junior instead of senior clients.
Long hours full of mundane work, such as password resets, client trainings, helping clients resolve trivial software issues, SQL work, editing decks, etc. As other reviews have mentioned, you’re “glorified tech support.”
The 360 review cycle pits employees against each other, making the process unnecessarily competitive and cutthroat. An unlucky project or two with an unreasonable client or challenging internal team can drop your review and even lead to APT asking you to leave.
APT also claims to be mostly free of politics and hierarchy, which can be false. Certain individuals have much more sway in the organization, and if they like or dislike you, this can have a major impact on your career. The hierarchy is also present, where more senior team members pawn off mundane and time-consuming work to BCs and seem to have different, laxer standards imposed on them.
Work / life balance is poor. APT claims to have better work / life balance compared to management consulting firms, but this is frequently not the case. Bad weeks can hit 80 hours when multiple clients are high burn, and the average is 55-60 hours per week. Burnout and frustration are fairly common, and APT doesn’t have a good approach for handling this.
Poor exit opportunities. Unlike management consulting, APT prefers that its employees stay for the long term. The alumni network is basically nonexistent, and exit opportunities are never discussed during recruiting or at the company. The skills you learn also aren’t very transferable to other roles, with the primary non-school exit being into data science. The brand equity is also extremely low compared to management consulting firms, and there’s no graduate school sponsorship.
Compensation starts off relatively high but drops off precipitously vs. management consulting as you move up the ladder.
