Booz Allen Hamilton, a fun name to say, but what does it mean, who are they as a
firm, and why would you as an aspiring consultant want to work there – or you as
somebody who's looking for services, be interested in hiring a company like Booz
Allen Hamilton. I'm Jenny Rae Le Roux, the managing director of Management
Consulted, and I'm here today to talk about one of the most incredible firms
that a lot of people don't know about inside the consulting industry. Booz
Allen Hamilton is a firm that originally had two different arms – one focus on
government consulting, and the other focused on corporate consulting – and in
2008, in the midst of the downturn, they spun off the arm that was focused on the
corporate consulting into Booze and Co. which later rebranded as
Strategy, after it was acquired by PwC, and what was left was this behemoth in
the federal consulting space Booz Allen Hamilton. Booze is a multinational firm
with 20,000 plus employees, so massive on the scale of consulting firms.
In comparison, it's a similar size to the Deloitte Consulting practice with
insight Deloitte, so it's a huge global practice. And the focus of everyone inside the
organization is on federal consulting. Booz Allen Hamilton is a firm with a lot
of tenure, really strong and proud culture, and a focus on improving the
quality, and experience, and expenditures of federal and other government agencies.
Booz Allen Hamilton is a really incredible place to work – if you are in
particular interested in politics, if you're interested in operating on the
cost side – a lot of what they do is very set by budgets which are revenue
oriented. So the focus of their organization is how to best deploy, the
focus is on delivery– so for example, you have an organization that does
everything on paper, how do you digitize it? You have an organization that meets
the needs of 40% of its constituents, how do you ensure that it meets the needs of
60% of the constituents or more? And you develop game plans, and transition plans,
and organizational designs to really shift the cost, where it's spent, and what
the effectiveness is of it over time. On the other side there are potentially
some reasons why you might not want to work for Booz Allen Hamilton. First of
all, if you're interested in corporate consulting, Booz Allen Hamilton is not
going to be the place for you because corporates do not really consider
migrating from the federal sector over to corporate to be a feasible job.
So you're setting yourself in a place where you're looking at federal roles
internally as primary exit opportunities, or just networking, just hitting the
streets and finding people and convincing them that the skills that you
build are relevant. In general the value of corporate consulting
environment for what you learn in federal consulting is not super high.
The second thing is if you actually on the job want to be focused on for-profit
work. So here you have a very triple bottom-line focused. So you've got the
bottom line, which is that you have to make the budgets match, and we have the
secondary bottom line, which is that you have to accomplish the services that you
were thinking about, and the third is the additional metrics that you're thinking
about as well. So, you're thinking about serving the
broader good, serving your constituents and also making sure of your budgets
match. So you have multiple things to think about, which is very different than
what you would do in the corporate world. And finally, Booz Allen Hamilton, because
it is focused on the federal agency, tends to be more staid, more focused on
long standing tenure, and less focused on hyperbolic performance increase like you
would find inside a lot of the corporate consulting firms. However, if you are
thinking about federal consulting, I think that a place like Booz Allen
Hamilton versus a practice area of federal consulting inside one of the
larger firms, like McKinsey federal or Deloitte federal, is attractive.
And here's why – everyone is very clear about what you're doing, you sell the most
projects out of any different organizations, you have
therefore dominant position in the market, and the knowledge sharing that
happens across the sector is incredibly powerful. If however, you want to hedge a
little bit and shift, instead of focusing on just the federal sector and leave the
options open for corporate later, working for an alternative practice, like a
federal practice inside one of the other firms, would be preferable. Overall, Booz
Allen Hamilton is the place that we help multiple people get into every year. Some
of them are in school in DC, undergrad masters, PhD, or MBAs, and others are
coming from outside the Washington DC area where Booze is the most active in
hiring. Booze does, however, have multiple different offices across the United
States, as well as internationally, so you have a lot of choices. If you'd like to
learn more about how to apply to and get jobs at Booz Allen Hamilton, we'd love to
share more – and you can reach us at managementconsulted.com or on social.