Citi Back Office or Accenture Tech Consulting?

Citi job is back back office, supporting entire company (not HR). Two 1-year rotations in both operations and technology. Being sold as a "leadership" development program-- basically grooming for middle management. Very small cohort-- approx 10.

Accenture is just tech consulting (not strategy/MC).

Accenture starts you out at ~80k, Citi at ~70k. Accenture has a bigger sign-on bonus too, not that it should matter that much. Both in NYC.

Background: Graduating Ivy engineer who recently decided she doesn't want to do engineering. Plan to go back school, most likely b-school. Not interested in i-banking and not sure if even interested in finance (so I know this is the wrong forum, but if you can direct me to a better one please do).

Help. I have no idea which will set me up better if I want to go to business school. I don't know if I should consider work-life balance, as I hear the consulting lifestyle wears on you. Esp. if I get stuck doing SAP implementation or something. I feel like I can really impress at Citi, but probably at Accenture too. Don't know what to expect from either.

8 Comments
 

Is Citi job some kind of management trainee program? If it involves rotation/leadership development, i believe it is a better bet than Accenture (at least from bschool perspective). Some back office roles are just purely FO support ( trade settlement, controlling etc) while others are more like traditional corp management role (budgeting, planning etc)

 

Yes, they call it a leadership development program. It is not supporting deals/settlements etc, but rather the operations and technology of the bank as a financial institution. So the areas of rotation could include tech. stuff that Accenture does but also other stuff like real estate, risk management, procurement, etc.

 

Citi job is salary. Obviously bonuses are nothing like FO, just typical end of year bonuses. Both are in NYC, though Accenture job is consulting so I could be anywhere in the country.

 
Best Response

I think you will get more varied experience with Accenture which will help you decide what you want to do long term.

Does the Accenture job require heavy travel? You need to consider that as well as it is a major pro and con. I think you will have a lot more interesting stories to tell after a couple of years at Accenture.

If the Citi program is extremely selective it could be a decent option but I think people will still assume it is automatically less prestigious/selective than almost any FO role.

For me this would be an easy choice to go with Accenture but I'm not you.

 

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