~250,000 (bonus dependent)

5

Deloitte is an excellent company to learn a variety of skills in business operations and management that drives home a quality of work and delivery, which is unique to consultants. Beyond the caliber of work, I found two things most valuable from my experience at Deloitte. 1) I was consistently encouraged to grow new skills. The career path was highly structured and organized (which I will address below), and each year I would be encouraged to learn new skills (e.g., people management, client partnerships, strategic thinking), while expanding my interests in a specific field. I was able to grow those skills quickly by branding myself as a consultant in banking and payments that worked at intersection of product design and growth strategy. Given the number of projects and possibilities of work at Deloitte, specializing on an industry and type of project enabled me to grow my consulting skills - working on a hypothesis based approach, executive messaging, and research and analysis. 2) Perhaps most importantly, I never stopped learning from those around me, which changed nearly every 9-12 weeks both with my direct teammates from Deloitte and with my clients. On the client side, I've worked and had to partner with a variety of different leaders, and despite their leadership style my goal always working towards the same goal of growth and transformation of the business. I've learned to put ego aside and be the partner my clients and their organization needed, whether that was direct and informational guidance or more persuasive and partnership led approach. Despite the business challenge or the client, I built relationships with senior and executive level leadership through trust-based partnerships at each organization I worked alongside. I would also learn from my always changing Deloitte teams. This taught me to be a functional manager and partner to my teams, always willing to put in the effort to work alongside and motivate the team with a smile and a lot of optimism.

The biggest red flag I noticed while working Deloitte was that to excel you had to be a conformist, which something I pushing myself to evolve through now. To be promoted or find interesting work at Deloitte you had to prove yourself in the Deloitte framework of achievement, which tied to sales, "utilization" (e.g., hours spent billing clients for work), and the sheer volume of work you could produce per hour. The most painful part of the conformist mentality was that the company didn't promote more individual thinking - there was limited white space when thinking about growth. For example, ideas had to be tailored to clients working in highly regulated and legacy organizations and each project also had the responsibility of finding a way to sell additional follow-on work. This translated to conformist thinking because even though I felt there were better solutions to my clients' business problems, leadership was keen to provide solutions based on existing framework and then sell follow on work. On one project, I had wanted to structure the approach for our client in the context of an interesting urban planning article I had read. On the surface, the idea was not directly related to financial services, but I had structured the analysis and future state vision to slowly evolve for the client as they decided to grow, but this idea was tied to a more limited consulting presence because it came in tailored phases. I was told by leadership to return to the old consulting framework and restructure my approach before sharing with the client. Conformity was also central to promotion and personal growth among consultants, where rigid rules on promotion and bureaucracy kept me feeling like "I had to do XYZ to achieve," rather than being motivated by interests and belief in the work. Learning from my experience at Deloitte, I realized that what I want most is to lean into the big ideas, challenge existing norms, and work in the whitespace.