Top Shareholders within the firm have decided to restructure the pay model for Consulting workforce resulting in moe than 50% of staff receiving pay cuts as, salary increases for the August year end result in a 0% change, resulting in a paycut as inflation stands at approx - 3%! So 50% of salaries are frozen for 1 more year!!! Wont be suprised if there will be a flooding of Accenture staff on the Job market!

Woah that sounds bad, is the consulting market on a downward spiral then???

The industry is cyclical, just like everything else. Yes, there seems to be some softening in the consulting market.

Although it is fair to say that there have been some 0% pay rises, these have been passed on to those people who have been performing at a consistent level or under performing over the last year. High performers and promotees are still receiving good pay rises.Rather than this being cyclical, it could be that the wages in the consulting market are catching up with the real world.

Accenture is paying now for the dot com burst of 2000 - when times were bad they had to get any contract and that meant looking at things like NHS.These projects bought accenture 5 years, and now it is finally time for them to respond to it, and how do they do this - pass on the short term mistakes of management to the long term career of employees.

insider: taking into consideration your point, are you also considering the amazingly 'fair' performance rating nad laddering mechanism??? i would leave if it were not for the 'golden handcuffs' aka joining bonus.

Virtually all consulting firms have ranking systems like we do. If you want to work for a consulting firm you have to expect rigourous performance management. It is also far fairer at ACN than other places I have seen (outside consulting) which are subject to far less scrutiny and review.

Low pay rises seem to be the norm now. I work in the BOP practice in PA, and the pay rises this year were in the region of 1 - 4%, depending on performance. The only ones that got a half decent rise were those who got promoted.

thats a matter of opinion rather than a state of fact. anyhow, the real issue here is that the firm is esentially rewarding the top 45% of the workforce. you're arguing that 55% of the workforce is not performing well enough to recieve a payrise above the inflation percentile. thats either saying alot about the quality of accenture workforce or sometihng about the firm's intentions to make people leave voluntarily.

That only holds true if you think that the same people will be in the bottom 55% year after year. In an up or out organisation that is just not the case. If you are in that category year after year you will not last long. You would expect most new promotes to be rated at consistent but in subsequent years to improve. Also most people at consistent are getting 2% which is more or less inflation. I really think that expecting to get a big pay rise just because you are in line with expectations is a bit out of whack - especially in consulting.

FACT 1: 2% is below market: average industry wage growth for this year is between 4 and 4.5%. So 2% increases for doing your ("Consistent") job is not "fair".FACT 2: fair is neither here nor there: bottom line rules. The UK part of the co simply doesn't have a pot of money to fund increases beyond those it has dished out. Why? NHS for starters and....FACT 3: ...return to shareholders. Dig a little deeper, and it's clear that a more-than-average slice of revenue is paid out as EPS: we consistently rank at the top end of shareholder return charts.So basically, if you're unahppy, don't sit around blaming the partners. It's the sharehodlers who are raking it in...oh, no wait, but aren't they...

No, Deloitte have got a huge recruitment drive on at the moment and are hiring across all of consulting so things are on the up and up in some organsiations.

re BOPpers comment, i work for PA and have had pay rises of over 4% every 6 months for the last 2 years - and significantly more than this when promoted.Clearly one would expect an annual pay rise with inflation, but there are examples where you might expect low pay rises. for example, if you have received a pay hike by moving jobs, there will be a flattening out of your salary, since you will get lower pay increases from a higher base than your peer group.also if you are not performing - but i think remuneration should be performance related. this is one of the things PA does really well. if you have a good year, you are rewarded. if you have a poor year, you are not. aside from the sometimes unfair outcomes this can have for the more junior employees, this is a model which motivates an ambitious workforce.

Can you expand on why the model may be unfavourable to junior employees???

Are Accenture stuggling then - I'd heard they had a few big projects in trouble i.e. Thames

Insider: "Good pay rises for high performers". lets run thorugh the numbers for high performers: 15% pay rise for exceptional performers (top 5% of what is already a very competitive workforce). For an analyst or consultant this typically means a pay rise of between £4K-£7K. 8% for the next 25% of performers (wow, I'm sure those in the top third of the organisation love working 60-80 weeks to pull in a massive £2K-£5K payrise.4% for for the next 20% of performers. Putting this into perspective and taking inflation into account you end up with 12.5%, 4.5% and 0.5% real pay increases. You gotta be kidding. Meanwhile the head of FS sells of $5m of shares...A C3 is generally earning less than a first year analyst in an investment bank. Go figure newbies!

Do they still call themselves Consultants?

anon... why the PA model is sometimes unfair to junior employees?At analyst / Consulatnt Analyst and Consultant level, you could be working on any job in the organisation across any of the practices. Some of the practices perform better than others. People in the better performing practices get better bonuses. All in all it means if you are a grad joiner in, say, ITManagement, you would get a worse bonus than a grad joiner in Government Services, even if you were in the same assignment team, hitting the same numbers and getting the same assignment reviews from the same manager. they tried to get rid of these anomolies a few years back but it hasnt really worked. Its annoying at the time but in the greater scheme of things everything works out as you only start earning real money when you get promoted a few levels - and, in my experience, promotion decisions are very fairly worked out.

Great...and that is the reason. ACN is not interested in consulting business anymore (have they ever been in...they sold ERP packages, and their "strategy" group, haha, useless). Technology goes India, so their focus is on outsourcing! Guys, this should be a wake up call!

Does anyone knowa) whether this change applies uniformally to all consulting streams and workforces?b) whether this change affects all consulting streams and workforces evenly? i.e. did they all have the same pay model beforehand?

Accenture is simply following their strategy and to the city are a very successful company. However they have not yet been open enough to their staff to tell them loudly enough that they are not a Consultancy, but merely an IT services firm such as EDS or IBM. I suggest to anyone that is working there who still believes it is a Consultancy or that it will change. It won't. I left in the summer and have gone to a real Consultancy. It's the best move I could have made. I recommend anyone disgruntled with Accenture to leave or face becoming increasingly frustrated with a company that will only being looking to deliver on it's strategy.

I am considering a job with Accenture in their Outsourcing division. What concerns should I have? Are the hours really stupid? why did you leave Accenture? Are the staff underneath it all unhappy or is it just like any other company, ie. you have your good times and your bad times...

Some (possible) good news! This from an email from David Thomlinson, Accenture UK MD, sent out yesterday."We have carried out a market analysis and the facts support an off cycle salary adjustment for a number of our people in the Consulting Workforce. Once again this has been made possible by our confident start to the year and we will look to make the adjustment early in calendar year 2007. "We shall see!

It would be interesting from the industry perspective to know if this really is that cyclical (i.e. the whole industry is severely weakening off) or a result of several very big account problems at ACN(e.g. Thames, NHS).Certainly tend to see it more as the latter myself right now. ACN might argue that their market share is big enough that whatever happens there it says something about the market. To some extent perhaps it does, but the MCA figures simply don't suggest industry-wide problems. If you consider that several top strategy firms are not included in these figures, then it would most probably strengthen the view that these are largely ACN's problems.

There is now recognition at the Accenture global leadership level that there is a problem in the UK with attrition and motivation of Consulting people. Structural changes are underway across the firm, although will take time to implement. In the short term the mid year (march) promotions point (analyst to consultant and consultant to manager) has returned after being scrapped last year. Salary adjustments will be made in the new year, and it is likely that annual bonuses will also be re-introduced after a 6 year absence for hot skills (SAP, Supply Chain etc). I've been with Accenture a long time and have gone through cycles similar to this before (although not quite as bad). This marks a turning point for the firm, and I (and many others) see it as a step in the right direction. One thing I have seen many times is that Accenture is very good at responding to internal issues and re-inventing itself, coming out stronger. This will be no different.