Wayne Anderson's answers

Avanade provides a wide variety of experiences as a consulting organization so I would submit there is no 'typical' day accross the organization. Therefore:

If you are on an engagement, you wake up in your hotel, complete your preparation, commute briefly to the customer site. At the customer site you will be working with the project to plan for the rest of the engagement and to work through implementations of the technology that we have been engaged with. You can always expect heavy microsoft involvement and a heavy front-end planning process before we are ever to a point that servers get configured. Depending on the time compression involved in the project, most of the time you finish near regular business hours and commute back to the hotel. From that point on, your time is yours. Often the evenings are spent getting dinner as a group or going to play pool, etc. The after-hours camraederie that is engendered during an engagement is one of my favorite parts of being on-site as a consultant.

When you are not on an engagement, you are on the bench. You wake up in your own bed, walk the 10 steps to your computer, sit down, and work on training acording to the development plan that you and your career manager have set out for the year. You do this until end of business or until you want to stop, whichever is later, and then you continue on with your evening. Bench time is extremely flexible, it is up to you to manage your schedule. Understand that Avanade has some base expectations about your general productivity on the bench but how and when you get things done is driven by you....

Understand that you are entering a consulting organization with a deep expertise in the Microsoft space. The consultants are (generally) smart and highly certified. Even management have Microsoft experience and technical knowledge. That being said, you do not have to prove yourself every minute of the day. A common thing to see for new junior consultants is usually the nervous conversation steering towards thier own experience. This is understandable. It is usually because the new consultant feels insecure, I know I did when I joined avanade. The truth of the matter is that your position amonst your peers is really going to be determined by your project work over time and your contribution to the common mailing lists we have at Avanade.

During your first few weeks, concentrate on learning how avanade does things, complete the many trainings you will be assigned, and read all the documentation you are given links to. No one expects you to be THE expert right out of the gate so relax and try to make your first few weeks about learning what you can that you did not know about us or the company systems, and less about connecting everything around you to something you have experience with....

Avanade uses a four stage interview process. The first step is the recruiter interview. This interview provides the feel for the recruiter to understand if your values and career goals are a good fit for avanade. Do you like to train? Are you interested in constant learning? Are you willing to fight hard to stay on the very front edge of technology? Is travel going to be a problem?

The second interview is a technical interview with either a System Engineer or an application developer, depending on your specialization. In this interview, you can expect to be asked a wide range of questions accross the board to generally cover the gamut of your area of expertise. During this interivew, the interviewer will take the time to work with you on assessing your questions about Avanade and the experience as an Avanade consultant.

The third and fourth interviews are in-person usually back-to-back. In this interview set, a director and another technical consultant will meet with you in person, ask questions that are more focused to your particular skillset and experience. The second technical interview is a chance for another technical specialist to get an idea of how you answer questions in person, how you conduct yourself in a technical situation, and how you present and explain answers. These are highly relevant skills in the consulting environment that may not neccessarily be required in a normal support or operations environment.

The directors job will be to integrate all of the knowledge and recommendations in the first three interviews and then use that information to take a deeper look at the HR and soft skills side of your career experience. The director will utlimately be the one to make the up or down decision on whether or not to extend you an offer....

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....