....my advise would be that unless you have absolutely no other choice-avoid them. If you do manage to get in - use the time to find out a proper jobI joined them in band 8 in September last year-had read many posts on here indicating that Band 8 'leads' projects, is a 'Senior' figure etc. The truth is that Band 8 is a commodity in IBM and band 9 is a slightly more precious commodity. Both are almost 100% delivery focused roles and IBM couldnt give a toss to how you keep yourself busy.Do not go by what you hear from their own staff about their work culture, opportunities, brand name etc. IBM has a miserable brand value in most strategic projects and the fact that they do what most commodity suppliers do but at 2 times the rate only means that they end up mopping the floor for large public sector accounts that have plenty of tax payers' money to wasteI am specifically talking about IBM Interactive which is a newly formed group within IBM and is IBM's lame attempt to get 'close to the non-IT customer' through marketing focused IT solutions. I joined this group after a 3 month on-boarding process only to find out that this was a highly opportunistic recruitment whereby the partner recruited me not because they had any relevant projects but because he had a window of opportunity to recruit-Which meant that I was dealing with a blatant lie-IBM-being a slow crawling organization is still too far behind in doing anything of any strategic value-had only hard core coding/infrastructure projects for me and which I obviously refused to take up. After sitting on bench for almost 8 months-they could still not find me any matching project and the pipeline was running dry. I had given up a lucrative offer with Yahoo! to join IBM but that is probably the worst mistake of my career. Things came to such a stand still that we finally decided to part ways (actually IBM pushed me out)Bottomline-1) If you are remotely considering moving away from IT - don't even think about IBM-even their Strategy and Change Practice does 'non-coding' projects and calls it strategy-you will be disappointed and depressed2) Do not go by what you hear from IBM staff itself - do independent research prior to joining them3) If you have 10+ yrs. experience, push for Band 9 - more than 15- go for Associate Partner role which is a band 10 executive consultant. DO NOT TAKE up band 8 roles unless you have less than 6-7 yrs. experience ! REGARDLESS of what you hear - band 8 consultants are PONIES!4) Band 8 salary- pitch for £70k base, band 9 - £80k base and band 10-£85-90k base5) Overall, the company is full of overpaid under achievers so if you join them dont be deluded about your company and the kind of people you will be interacting with. Clients know this fully well and rightly treat IBM consultants as only being capable of filling up certain roles and NO that DOES NOT include anything remotely strategic.