Accenture: An insider guide - Gymkhana

Lifestyle and Hours
Analysts and consultants should expect an active daily work schedule that gets
filled up quickly with meetings, technical problem solving, and individual report
work. There’s not a lot of down time: Insiders are continually responding to
demands from managers, teammates, or clients. One insider estimates that
consultants spend 20 to 50 percent of the day in meetings. When you’re not
interacting with the client or fixing bugs, you’ll try to squeeze in an hour to
concentrate on analysis and documentation projects that may be assigned to you.
Accenture folks often find themselves on deadline, as teams finish stages of the
bigger project. “There are some self-enforced and some very hard ones. Generally
no one likes to delay a project. At the same time, if this doesn’t get done, you
don’t like to move on to the next change,” says one insider.
The Workplace
Projects can last anywhere from a few weeks to a few years. Regardless of how
short or long they are, projects operate in cycles. So consultants can expect to
work longer hours and even some weekends when a big deadline looms. “Its
sort of like a college class schedule,” says one insider. “There are times when
things are slow and chugging along, times when you put a little more in and if
you pace yourself you should be fine.” Says another insider, “I have had to
work a few nights, but nothing too crazy. As you get higher up in the company,
you tend to work a few more hours, but that is expected with the nature of the
job. I have only had to work weekends once, but that was told to me ahead of
time and it was due to the nature of the project (a week-long assignment in a
sunny location, which I didn’t mind at all).”
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