Job Title: Senior Associate
Location: Los Angeles
Submitted on: 06-Sep-04
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Job Title |
Workplace
Survey |
| Senior Associate |
I work for the RAS (Risk Advisory Services) group, KPMG's equivalent to
a consulting practice. I am told that due to its current non-compete
agreement with BearingPoint, there are certain areas of consulting which
KPMG cannot practice. Thus, our consulting area is called "advisory
services", and consultants are called risk advisors.
Working for KPMG's advisory services has been a positive experience
overall. My work has been primarily in the area of performing
operational audits from a risk based perspective. In addition, we are
allowed to do performance improvement work as well.
The culture of KPMG is very informal by big 4 standards. The people I
have met have been very easy to get along with and work with.
Typically, KPMG prefers to recruit experience professionals instead of
from well known business schools. And I think that this reinforces
KPMG's informal, nonstuffy culture.
The upside is that the firm is growing very quickly. Because the RAS
practice is so small relative to the audit and tax side, and because
much of our work comes from these other lines of business (with the
exception of external audit clients, of course!), the firm's near term
growth prospects over the next 3-4 years looks considerably better than
other firms. Another upside is that I think the work hours are a little
less than compared to the other firms.
I think the downside is that because we are a smaller firm, the chance
of travel is greater compared to other firms. Of course, this probably
depends on industry but overall, the experience among the people with
whom I have worked is that there is considerable amount of travel.
In my experience, half of my engagements required me to travel from the
West Coast to the East Coast on a weekly basis. This gets old quick!
Another downside is that I think the infrastructure is less developed
than compared to its peers. I think that human resource practices tend
to be a little loosey-goosey here. Also, knowledge management here is
pretty mediocre. I was shocked at the lack of a shared area for sharing
work and the other research resources is very poor.
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