Hi. Does anyone have experience of working for or with Chaucer? Do you know what pay, conditions and culture are like? Thanks for your input.

oh womb, oh belly, oh stinking cod

Er, thanks I think....Any chance of an answer which bears relation to the question?

Chaucer was tough. Being in the shadow of Shakespeare equated to a culture of pressure. We worked long hours churning out quality yarns which have stood the test of time but evetually failed to deliver the grail. If you want to be the bridesmaid then I say go for it.

I agree with Colin - it was not easy. There was a lot of travel - especially trips to Canterbury - and to be honest he used to bore me to death with his rubbish stories. And was pay was often just a few pieces of silver (if we were lucky).Conditions and culture were both 'medieval'.

Does ayone know the application process at Chaucer? Thier website does not seem to have a career section. Was looking if they were hiring for thier russian office and how to go about submitting an application

2 days, several smart .... comments, no result. If ever there was an allegory for consulting 'adding value', then this must be it.

HelloI used to work for them and they were a nice bunch of people - although most senior management are siblings (as the founder and ceo employs his sons in senior roles). I found it to be characterized by nepotism, although had some interesting roles within oil and gas. They do not walk the walk, however, and I found them to not really value people in the end (despite what they will tell you). Interesting though, if you want to have the potential opportunity to branch out of typical big 4 environments and worth my two years only because of the decent people, most of whom are now gone..contact me if you want more offline info..

I've worked with a couple of Chaucer consultants. The conditions they worked with seemed fine although we were all based at client site in London so hotel, travel, etc. policies (which are usually the crunch points) didn't come into play. I remember that they didn't have corporate phones or email/VPN (that they used).Culture-wise, it seemed very much like working for Chaucer was closer to contracting than consulting. Both Chaucer consultants (who I met at different times) were working alone and said that was how they normally did projects - they'd never worked with other Chaucer consultants and worked from home when not on the client site. Project involvements seem to be small (in number of consultants working with the client) but long-term (both were contracted to work on transformation programmes from initial exploration through to post-implementation evaluation - a period of about 2 years). I didn't get the impression that Chaucer culture was particularly strong - they seemed to use their personal materials / general frameworks like Prince 2 rather than branded Chaucer ones. On the plus-side, it didn't seem like they were subject to a lot of onerous Chaucer internal processes.

I have to disagree with the previous post - Chaucer developed and rolled out many of its consulting tools, were provided with state of the art phones and laptops, they paid for the set up of my home office and wifi and were pretty decent with reimbursing expenses..As for being left alone on client site and not working with other chaucer consultants, that was not true of my experience..indeed there was a strong network of people always on hand for support...

Hi. Chaucer Consulting has, on-paper, some organisational hierarchy, but to all intents and purposes, the company is reasonably "flat" and opportunities to have an impact are significant. The company fosters a self-help approach, where consultants are expected to take the initiative to suggest improvements or request assistance. But the internal support network is reasonably strong when assistance is requested. Client-facing work is very much focussed on 'one project at a time' working at a client-site, rather than trying to juggle demands from many different clients at once. This suits people who prefer to immerse themselves in a client's challenge and focus entirely on managing it through to resolution. Basic project work-templates exist, but are rarely used because each project carries such intrinsic uniqueness that it's often easier to develop something bespoke from scratch. As process consultants, the Chaucer team specialise in asking the right questions to elicit salient details from the client's own subject matter-experts, in order to develop a fit-for-purpose solution into which all key stakeholders have contributed.As with any organisation, it suits some people and not others; on the one hand, remuneration is competitive and people are given responsibility reasonably quickly, but on the other, it's family-owned, which can be an issue for some. Hope this helps.

Thanks guys for your responses. It is really helpful, and on balance has helped me to decide that Chaucer may not be the best fit for me right now. But maybe in the future.....