Whether the tasking is interesting and rewarding - or even aligns with one's actual skills and experience - is increasingly a crapshoot. For employees, keeping "billable" is #1 priority in this firm. It's not enough to be working 50 hours a week on proposals, investment tasking, internal projects, etc. If you're not billable, you're gone: the Damocles' sword of "Lack of Work" letters hangs over everyone who can't find their own billable tasks. One gets very limited assistance in finding new tasking - even junior staff are expected to "be professional" and find their own work. Very tough if one isn't broadly and tightly networked into the organization - extremely difficult with operations almost 100% distributed and the vast majority of corporate meetings done "virtually". Employees also have to create their own opportunities to meet face to face with other Booz Allen folks (and find the time to do so, because in Booz Allen's ideal world, every single staff member would be full time on a client site; one has to be at least a Sr. Associate to get a permanent office in a Booz Allen facility - the rest who aren't on client site either telework or "hotel"; the latter are only able to book offices from week to week, and have to keep their stuff in lockers at other times. In some situations, you may NEVER see another Booz employee face to face for weeks or months. It's particularly sad for new hires who never get a sense of belonging to the company, and may get little guidance from their career manager, who are often not engaged on the same projects. We're all generally left to fend for ourselves. And there is a very inconsistent level of managerial support - again it's a crapshoot. If you get a good manager, you get good support - but otherwise...plus the managers are all under pressures not so much to manage their staff as to make sure they make their billability targets. This is a generalization - but in my experience, Booz Allen goes through these cyclical crises of "utlization" or "billability" tracking, and we're all forced to flail around accepting whatever work comes along, regardless of whether it fits into our career strategy (ha ha ha!). Now I admit, a lot of this is the result of the weaking market since 2007 - but it is reflective of what some others here have observed: the company (a management consulting firm, mind you, so there's no excuse) is not very adept at adapting to market changes any more. Back when we were a privately held company, there seemed to be a lot more ability to weather such vagaries in the market and to protect the employees from too much of the fallout. But now we're all in constant crisis mode to some extent. And the much-heralded "core values" that the company still touts as one of its "key differentiators" in the market - well, we may live up to those values when it comes to serving our customers - but when it comes to management dealing with their staff, I don't see a lot of evidence of any "core value" except keep the profits high enough for our shareholders. It's very sad - and despite the negativity of this review, I'm holding on, living in hope that upper management will wake up and recognize that its current approaches are increasing angst and decreasing the quality of Booz Allen as a place to work. (The fact that we fell off the Top 100 places to work list last year after many, many years of being on it, doesn't seem to have fazed anyone...which says a lot.)
