As an associate and even a consultant you have very little say in what you are going to do. You'll get pulled into projects that tank your utilization, meetings will be scheduled outside of your work hours. Everything is largely top-down and getting your buy-in is treated as optional. There are little to no opportunities to use more sophisticated analysis or build tools. Whether this is a problem or not depends on your skillset and what you want to do. Your days will revolve around meetings, powerpoint, word, and occasionally excel, but don't expect to learn anything beyond that. There's no SQL, VBA, macros, or statistics. Visualizations are usually just within powerpoint and tableu is not really used. Echoing previously made reviews, managers set a culture of attrition: Even on their PTO days they will check in multiple times a day, and you cannot set your own work boundaries if they are pinging you for things late into the night. This is not malicious, but you have some people that like to take a break around 5 or 6, then sign back on, and other that prefer to stay on for a bit longer then sign of for the entire night. Since we are often staffed on 2+ projects, you can be just wrapping something up for a project at 7pm when another manager hops back online and pings you for something else. Projects are scoped with an attitude of "you don't say no", and that can be seen in how we handle client requests; out-of-scope work is often added on, and we will deliver exactly what the client wants even if it isn't reasonable or is against our better judgement. Ultimately this is good for business, but the brunt of these decisions will be on your shoulders.
