A really good place to start a career - Recensione dipendente - Senior Associate presso Plural Strategy

I found Plural a really good environment to start my career in a number of ways. Coming in as an Intern or Analyst, you are trusted and empowered with genuine responsibility from the start of your career, encouraged to participate in team discussions about the project at a high-level, and take ownership to ensure your work is feeding in to how the client problem is being solved and the answers that the team is arriving at. This early responsibility, along with exposure to a range of sectors, project types and client types, facilitates both rapid learning and the potential for quick progression. There is an embedded culture of feedback and mentoring, both on a project-by-project basis, and through regular check-ins with line managers and twice-a-year appraisals. The team at Plural is also keen to provide training time and resources to plug any gaps and to broaden the knowledge and experience of the team, and is receptive to requests and input into how best to improve training and knowledge-sharing. I found the culture to be positive and Plural to be a genuinely enjoyable place to work, which helps when hours can sometimes be long and work can be stressful. There is good visibility of and access to senior leadership, and a generally strong culture of openness to collaboration and willingness to support team members who need help - I found that the majority of people get on really well and enjoy spending time with each other. There is a growing emphasis on CSR initiatives, with increasing scope for team volunteering opportunities as well as the ability to partake in the occasional social impact project and be involved in outreach to schools and universities - the willingness of senior management to allow more junior staff to drive and own these kind of initiatives feels empowering and is a good indicator of the culture that the leadership is keen to cultivate. I also enjoyed social activities and playing sports with colleagues - the ability to interact with the New York office and the secondment opportunity is also really beneficial and exciting. I found there is a genuine commitment to doing good work for clients, regardless of the engagement type and client problem. The project lifecycle that is followed, whether on commercial due diligence projects or strategy engagements, is focused on properly defining the problem, developing hypotheses, and working with client data, access to customers and desk-based research to validate hypotheses and build a properly-evidenced and well-structured narrative to tell a client. There is always going to be an issue of imperfect information and time pressures in this industry, but I found the general company ambition to provide a comprehensive and intellectually rigorous approach to problem-solving satisfying.