You are here: Home: Employer insights: Oliver Wyman : About the organisation
Oliver Wyman is a management consulting firm that advises clients on strategy, operations, risk management, organisational transformation and leadership development. It employs around 3,000 staff and has offices in over 50 cities in 25 countries. The firm competes with the best: Bain & Company and McKinsey & Company are considered peers.
Oliver Wyman acts on behalf of clients across a broad range of industries, including: automotive; aviation, aerospace and defence; communications, media and technology; energy; financial services; health and life sciences; industrial products; retail and consumer products; and surface transportation.
Oliver Wyman is part of Oliver Wyman Group, a privately held group of three firms that specialise in management, brand and economic consultancy. The other members are Lippincott, which specialises in brand strategy and design, and NERA Economic Consulting, which provides economic analysis and advice.
The group is itself a subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies, a global professional services firm that made £10bn in 2010.
Marketing materials insist that the firm delivers ‘results not reports’, but the latter is actually an area in which it excels. Its ‘State of the Financial Services Industry’ report has found an eager audience since 1997 and the firm recently launched ‘State of the Communications, Media & Technology Industry’.
The firm excels in reporting.
Its partners are regularly quoted in broadsheets and trade press. One of them, Adrian Slywotzky, has been nominated for the 2011 Thinkers 50, the ‘definitive global ranking of management thinkers’.
Oliver Wyman enjoyed a five-year run of 15 to 20% growth which, unsurprisingly, came to an end in 2009. It responded in typically entrepreneurial fashion, creating a public policy practice to advise financial services clients in this area. The firm’s ability to diversify meant it bounced back in 2010 with revenue of £1.4bn.
The salary paid to consultants with no experience is circa £36,000 per annum, rising to circa £40,000 per annum after two years.
Oliver Wyman’s headquarters may be in New York but the firm has developed a distinctly European feel since it established its London office in the 1980s. The expansion continued apace and today more than half of its workforce is based in cities such as Frankfurt, Madrid, Paris and Moscow.
Do they play table football in the Sao Paolo office? New recruits may find out for themselves. This is an international firm and consultants typically spend half their time working on overseas assignments. The hotels are rumoured to be decent and, if the job is in Europe, the firm tries to get people home in time for Friday drinks.
On average, consultants work 60 hours a week, depending on project status, and are often permitted to work from home. Ten-month work years, sabbaticals and opportunities to do not-for-profit work have been given the green light. There’s even a work/life scorecard, with the firm intervening if things get out of kilter.
Oliver Wyman runs a scheme known as the ‘non-profit fellowship’. This lets community-oriented consultants take six months off to work at a non-profit organisation and still get paid 40% of their salary. Participants have worked at the Charles Darwin Foundation, Teach for India and the Clinton Foundation.
The firm also partners with and conducts advisory projects for:
Voluntary and philanthropic work is an office tradition and each new generation seems to come up with its own spin. Dan Sack, an Oliver Wyman consultant, is driving across Mongolia in the 2011 Mongol Rally. His team, appropriately named ‘No turning yak’, is raising funds for the Christina Noble Children’s Foundation.
Oliver Wyman was traditionally something of a patriarchy, and there still aren’t many female partners. Targeted recruitment is working, however, and the number of females joining the company from university is increasing year on year.
While there is no formal outreach programme for ethnic minorities, this does not seem to have had a pronounced effect on the make-up of the workforce.
The firm has an LGBT society.
Employer insights are written by independent experts with job candidates in mind, helping you research and understand employers.
Copyright of all material written for Employer insights lies solely with GTI Media.
Register for how to get hired advice straight into your inbox
©2012 GTI Media Ltd. Registered in England No. 2347472.
Registered office: The Fountain Building, Howbery Park, Benson Lane, Wallingford, Oxfordshire OX10 8BA UK