Pros
I worked for two years at Noetic’s Canberra office, where I started as an intern/research assistant with little experience outside my undergraduate course work. After a few months of working directly on consultancy projects with state and federal government clients, I moved into a full-time consulting role, and by the time I left Noetic to move back home, I was managing and leading projects and teams with minimal oversight. In short, Noetic was a rare opportunity to get skills, experience, and exposure in a very short time period. And this isn't limited to junior employees starting out in the workforce – senior consultants with 25+ years experience also have ample opportunity to explore outside their expertise and work in new domains across new service areas.
Noetic's greatest strength is the talent and personality it attracts. From my peers to the senior leadership team, everyone I worked with was very intelligent, hard working, thoughtful, collaborative and approachable. I found Noetic to be the kind of place where you can stand up in the middle of the office, put forth to the group a challenge you're grappling with, and your colleagues will not hesitate to help you brainstorm and problem solve. While Noetic has high expectations for its employees, requiring a lot of focus and self-motivation, fun and humor is encouraged and definitely had on a daily basis.
Noetic is an invaluable place to work, but I recognize it isn't for everyone. Noetic isn't a large, traditional consulting firm (e.g. PwC, Deloitte), where employees tend to have very specific roles and focused responsibilities, working under a lot of established protocols, procedures, policies, etc. Noetic has very little internal red tape, undertakes a great breadth of projects with a relatively small workforce, and employees need to be very flexible and adaptive to successfully move across different subject matters, contribute to business development activities, write small and large proposals, engage in internal capacity building, etc. Leadership will recognize your strengths and interest areas, and do what it can to align incoming projects with your goals and preferences, but the company operates in a fast-paced environment with competing priorities, so it's unrealistic to expect that you'll always get the exciting project right within your wheelhouse. If you're looking for a prescriptive job description, need a lot of structure, and expect intensive induction before diving right into projects, Noetic probably isn't the best place for you. Noetic is an extremely supportive environment, but working outside your comfort zone, self-learning, and proactively identifying opportunities for yourself are important to success.
Cons
My only 'con' is that after working at Noetic, my next role felt very unfulfilling, and I missed the autonomy Noetic affords its employees. The work at Noetic is uniquely varied and interesting, and as a young person still in the early stages of their career, it's pretty rare to find an organization that not only very much trusts you to take on a lot of responsibility and make independent decisions, but also encourages you to openly challenge the norm both inside and outside of the organization.
