Capco reviews

The ability to take criticism - also in public reviews - has still to be trained. Especially in recent past the promotions prompted questions. It is more than just suspect if employees get promoted to career levels though they are far away from meeting the requirements of that levels. In some cases it seems to be much more political than performance-driven - whatever the motivations of the promotion-responsible persons are... By taking a look at the usual Principal Consultants (one above Senior Consultant, one below Managing Principle), these are people with firm consulting experience, having built up sound expertise over years in fields which are key to the company and the industry. They take sales responsibilities and are also measured against those (there are monetary targets to hit) and - of course - they are responsible for managing revenues, projects, people, and for topics dealing with the business to attract clients and to win projects. This requires hard work and experience in both dimensions, numbers of years and intensity. It gets multiple employees' attention if someone gets promoted to Principal Consultant level without having any notable consulting experience during his/ her time at Capco, and the previous promotion to Senior Consultant already appeared very generous. There is no base - neither by applying the officially valid performance assessment framework nor by applying common sense - to promote employees to Principal Consultant level who have very little client project experience and thus have not generated much revenue for the company. Internal projects - also in cooperation with the parent company - represent a lower level of comparability, and they generate no revenue (we all know that Capco is not a non-profit company and the billable component is one of a few hard performance criteria). Aditi onally, it is more questionable when the same employees with little or no client project experience do not even stand for any topic important to Capco's business, be it from the financial industry's business or technology side. As a conclusion those very fast promoted employees cannot be seen as consultants at all by this what they do. What is going on then? Officially, Capco does have a quite comprehensive and clear performance assessment framework. And the performance of people who get promoted has to be sustained over a period of time. So how can it be that people get promoted if they don't do management consulting at all and simply cannot meet the framework's requirements? They do not even meet the requirements of their current level - what might sound mean but it reflects reality. It just sticks to facts. The roundtable process should fairly assess performance and skills and determine whether the requirements of the next level are met. Apparently, Capco is not very consequent in this process. And the majority of hard and well working, experienced and skilled employees, who generate business and demonstrate management work, gets mocked. The theory what Capco has set up concerning the performance assessment looks pragmatic and reasonable. Nevertheless, recent promotion incidents showed that the roundtable assessment sometimes tramples on the framework and promotes people for arcane reasons.

In Consulting Services you have to work on client projects - most of the time. This is common knowledge. To be promoted one has to show up with performance (whatever this means), mainly on client projects, get proper appraisals and so on - so far, so good. To become a Principal Consultant you need a proper consulting history, you need to express some minimum seniority (also in years of experience and relevance of experience), and overall there are some rules which are also officially communicated: you have to bring in business or at least perform as project manager for a while, be responsible for some minimum revenue, manage a team and of course you need to have and demonstrate relevant skills. These skills have to be related to the business such as subject matter expertise, methodology and so forth. But if Capco promote people to Principal Consultant in high speed, who have nearly never been billable, nearly no important knowledge about the business, nearly no client project experience, who cannot really be seen as consultants at all, then this is going a beyond a joke. People who provide marketing material and support well in project proposals are truly useful but this is not consulting. Promoting those people to Principal Consultant - especially if you compare their profiles to those of other Principal Consultants - is inappropriate. This exceeds any tolerance regarding unfairness.