Experiences at Avanade

Avanade is primarily a consulting organization. That being the case, your commute really depends on whether or not you are customer facing (which most of us are). If you are customer facing, your commute varies depending on the day and the client site. For example, the start and end of week travelling is usually several hours each way. Within the week, however, the commute is only as long as it takes to get from the hotel to the client site and back.

When you are staffed on a local project, the commute is usually as per normal for the area you live in. In denver, it is about 30-45 minutes to anywhere in the DTC or downtown.

If I am staffed on a remote project out of the house, my commute can be the 11 steps it takes me from my bedside to my office chair.

These sorts of varied experiences and the constant change is what draws me to consulting in the first place. If you are someone who enjoys and expects a routine involving a specified commute time range that you will follow day in and day out, I would submit that Avanade may not be the best organization for you....

Actually its not as bad as many technical organization. Because the primary job function for me is as a consultant my access to caffenated beverages varies depending on where I happen to be located and what I happen to be working on atht eh given time.

During travel engagements, I find that I tend to drink much more caffeine via coffee, diet soda, and the like. When I am at home, however, I tend to drink almost none, preferring to drink water....

Avanade provides a training budget (including both money/resources and time) which you are not only encouraged to use but are actually REQUIRED to have made use of as part of your annual review.

Avanade further uses a management structure whereby your actual oversight is from a career manager, a person who is as much responsible for helping you grow within the company as they are for actually providing oversight and feedback on the work and engagement that you accomplish.

Finally, the benefits package that avanade provides is first rate. While I am not sure exactly what is confidential with regards to what can be publicly disclosed about the package, I can say that Avanade has taken pains to make sure that both traditional benefits and some ...... "tech friendly" benefits are extended to every employee....

Avanade has shown incredible growth for the last 6 years. This was one of those rare but pleasant cases where Avanade found me. I was working for another company in the IT industry at the time and avanade apparently stumbled accross my resume online. The active recruiting program approached me via email about possibly doing a phone interview to see if I would be a good fit for what avanade is looking for and to see if I might be interested in a posible position with the firm and what it has to offer. At present, avanade maintains an active recruiting system to search for the excellent quality human resources that make a consulting business possible in East, West, South, and Central regions of the US....

Avanade generally is a business casual environment. At the seattle Global Market Development building (known in most circles as our headquarters office), a polo and general slacks or khakis are the call of the day. On the client site, we tend to get our cue based on the work that is going on. If you are consulting on an accenture project, or appearing at an accenture office, we generally want to meet and excel at thier usually high standards. Whatever the client dress code is, we go one step or a half step better at first until we have a feel for what the client expects. In any case, we never dress below business casual at any client engagement unless we are consulting in a place with specific safety needs....

Avanade works generally with a higher quality of people. At every company there is always a certain ratio of the intellegent to the useless. At Avanade, I have found that ratio is far higher in terms of the degree of intellegent people availible on a given project than at any organizations I have worked with before. Having this level of expertise around me makes my job easier and motivates me to enhance my own work in order to continue to stand out on any given consulting engagement. This task is made far easier when I know that I am working with professionals that I can also trust to get thier components of a given project done without having to step in and accelerate the process....

Avanade is a business casual environment, you dress to your clientele.