The other reviews about how the company has gone through A LOT of changes in the last 3-5 years are right on target. As someone who joined the firm right before the split with Booz & Co. (commercial size of the business) and Carlyle buyout, I can tell you that these changes have left employees holding the bag in many respects, which is evidenced by their increasing turn-over rate. People are heading for the door! A few specifics:
Opportunities for training/certification and advancement are getting harder to come buy is this more fiscally constrained environment, which is being driven by Quarterly Earning Reports and shareholder pressure than by long-term business objectives. Booz Allen used to understand that as part of the consulting services industry, it could not afford to treat employees as an expense. But that's just what they are doing. As a company that offers advice (not tangible goods), the quality of which depends on attracting, maintaining, and investing in the continuing education of the best people they can find.
Management is less and less interested in matching/able to match talent with projects they want to work on. Their bonuses aren't tied to employee satisfaction but are tied to how many people are on their teams, keeping them billable ("rear ends in seats" mentality), and how much new business/revenue they bring in. So there is a lot of pressure to stay where you are (not change teams or even projects) and put in a lot of "volunteer" (read not billable) time toward business development activities. Sadly, this volunteer work doesn't seem to get much recognition come assessment time. I have personally served on many internal volunteer initiatives, and I'm lucky of these are even mentioned in one line on my assessment.
The assessment process is beyond burdensome (taking an entire 4 months from start to finish, each year) and is not nearly as objective as leadership seems to think. Based on my own experience and having watched many peers go through their own assessments, it's a pretty biased process. I've seen underperformers get promoted because they were in good with the right managers. Likewise, I've seen deserving bosses and peers alike be passed up for promotion for reasons having nothing to do with their skills and performance. In addition, development actions for the next year are often determined by manager priorities and not by the career path the employee wants to take (I once had a manager require me to participate in a social media round table volunteer group even though I'm not interested in it because he oversaw it). The politics in the assessment process permeate the rest of the firm.
The matrixed model the firms prides itself on means employees are subject to a growing beurocracy and a "rule by committee" environment where decisions aren't really ever made and are stood by even less. I have actually seen people get in trouble for moving forward based on a leadership decision because another leader didn't like the decision (e.g. the "committee" wasn't in total agreement or the decision wasn't properly "socialized"). Employees are evaluated on their ability to navigate politcal environments, not on their ability to deter political approaches to problem solving and interpersonal relationships. That means being up front and honest is not only undervalued, it's a liability for those of us who consider ourselves tactful, but obove all else straight-shooters.
As I said above, I'm glad to have worked here overall. But there's been a lot of bad that came with the good.
