Organizational sustainability and career frameworks in professional services firms

This article proposes a resourcing model that can be used to optimize the costs of large professional services ï¬ rms [PSFs]. Its outcome is based on trade-offs between promotions and external hires under a variety of ï¬ rm-specific constraints. It is enabled by continuous coupled age structured equations that take into account the workforce evolution at each level of the hierarchy. The model ï¬ rst explicitly provides conditions on the leverage structure of a PSF to design a pure †up or out†organization. Second it shows that a professional services organization can benefit from creating alternate career tracks such as pools of specialists with different compensation schemes. The type of cost optimization is shown to achieve about 5% savings.