Avantages
The company attracts very intelligent, worldly and diverse colleagues with whom you can build at least healthy working relationships. It has a unique service offering. It is the only one among its peers that offers crisis management, physical security, political analysis, and business intelligence, cyber security, among other services. This makes potential growth and diverse experience more likely. And there is a genuine openness for employees transitioning from one service line to another. Following on from the last two points, its service offering and capable staff mean that it attracts very high calibre clients with interesting problems to solve. Depending on the service line, there is a decent opportunity to travel, and certainly an openness to deploying staff on international postings.
Inconvénients
Senior management is still peppered with the "old boys" of the company's dying past as the private sector version of an officer's club. Though they will fall in numbers as the years pass, the few that remain are in senior roles where they appear immovable. Their disconnect from the more dynamic, ambitious, overworked and underpaid, and less clubbable employees is frustrating at best. While the pay is slightly below market, it is tolerable. What is less tolerable is that the pay is not commensurate with the workload or the toll that the work takes since it is highly stressful. This will not likely be resolved any time soon. The final con is the sheer level of bureaucracy and administration. Even the most determined and well meaning employee, a zealot, a fanatic, would give up at the futility of achieving even the smallest amount of change. On the plus side, they know it and hopefully they will do something about it.