Vantaggi
Really excellent company culture. The vast majority of people in the Client Services (CS) team genuinely want to help you, teach you, and see you succeed. The team environment was very cooperative, in my experience. The camaraderie among the CS team is great in both a personal and a professional sense--it's easy to work hard alongside people you respect and enjoy spending time with. The company tends to hire very smart and capable people, meaning you can always rely on your teammates, no matter what clients ask for. I also found that team leads were eager to give credit for good work to junior employees where it was due, both internally and in communications with clients. I found the work-life balance to generally be very healthy. I worked 40 hours a week for about 80% of my time at the company, and there's absolutely no cultural norm of "staying at the office late = being good at your job". They're very flexible about when you arrive and leave, and about working from home, as long as you're reasonable about it. There are also happy hours (monthly) and company outings (4-5/year). If you can establish a reputation for delivering high-quality and inventive work, you're more likely to be put on interesting projects. Most team leads in CS are very receptive to innovative ideas, and if you demonstrate value you'll be rewarded with as much trust, independence, and respect as you can earn. I got a lot of extremely valuable experience interacting with clients. The directors and MDs I worked with were very comfortable with letting junior employees take credit for and present their work directly to clients, even client management. I also got to spend a lot of time working side-by-side with clients.
Svantaggi
The work that Client Services (CS) does is not very innovative or intellectually challenging. The methodology for most of the predominant types of service packages has been set in stone for years, and often requires a considerable amount of rote work. Employees are smart and qualified enough to execute much more complex types of analysis, but few senior leaders are interested in exploring and promoting that type of work to customers (although this attitude seems to be changing at all levels). This job is nearly pure supply chain work. If you're fresh out of college and don't know what that entails, do your research before applying here. You're likely to spend most of your time looking for savings on various types of power-industry items (e.g. transformers or wire), on a tactical or short-term strategic basis. There are usually one or two management/high-level strategy projects going on or in the pipeline, but they are the exception. Opportunities to meaningfully distinguish yourself can be somewhat rare, due to the nature of the work. I'd definitely recommend picking up ancillary tools and knowledge (e.g. basic statistics, corporate finance, Excel modeling, global market-relevant current events, graphical data presentation) to help you stand out even when the actual work is pedestrian and doesn't require much creativity or flair. It's also very important to be proactive (and lucky) about pursuing engagements you think are interesting and relevant to you; fortunately, management is supportive of getting you where you want to be in terms of experience. The pay is not very competitive, although for me the healthy culture and work-life balance was a pretty fair exchange.