For Consulting: Trade-off is slightly higher pay, but lot of travel from home, long work hours & poor work life balance.
Pros
Typical consulting benefits of variety (due to moving from one project to the next), smart (but competitive) people, and travel (which can quickly be way too much time away from home).
Cons
In consulting field, offers typical jobs oriented around client project based work with significant travel (typical week is travel out on Monday and return on Thursday evening) plus have to a lot of other "work plates spinning" such as sales targets, client utilization, recruiting and face-time/networking with the Partners to get ahead. Promotions are definetly based on how well you are liked versus so called performance criteria. In the end, it's time for money. And, you work so many hours the amount you really earn is not the much compared with industry jobs.
