Accenture

Accenture is a huge consulting/outsourcing company. Their modus operandi is to hire graduates with good to great degrees, offer them a good amount of money with a well-known employer brand, and then make them work crazy hours.

• Generally smart and hardworking colleagues.
• Good intro to the consulting business.
• The work ethics and general business insights you learn will carry you wherever you decide to move from ACN.
• Pay is usually pretty good with overtime pay and bonuses and all.

Accenture is great at selling customers what they want, not what they need. You will most likely end up doing long hours on a project of questionable value for the customer.

Lots of internal ranking, learn as fast as possible how to play the ranking game. Make sure to form very close ties to all of your supervisors, ask for coaching, try to be active in selling stuff, make sure to bill over 100%, do whatever it takes to get positive reviews from customers, make sure to give plenty of self-praise and sell yourself as well, etc.

If you end up in the bottom end of the totem pole in the rankings, be prepared for high school-style bullying. You are going to get smoked out, even if the company is recruiting more people with your profile.

Hours can be quite long; expect to work on the weekends.

Note that personally, I only went through one review cycle and ended up in the top segment. This wasn't because I consider myself to be anything special, but I did my homework with the ranking game. I was feeling okay in the company; I left because of a really interesting opportunity elsewhere.