Company: EY
Date: 2016-01-18
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Technology Advisory Staff Consultant
Pros: Big 4 reputation. A large organization that touches on all areas of industry. Amazing co-workers. Great company culture. Many firm-sponsored happy hours. Recruiting process is very efficient.
Cons: The "Vision 2020" growth plan is extremely aggressive (doubling revenue from 25bn to 50bn by 2020). One of the ways that the firm has tried to work towards this goal is by rapidly ramping-up the hiring of staff-level consultants for their advisory consultant "rotational" program. As a result - there has been a very large influx of entry-level employees with relatively stagnant changes in the amount of work being sold, which leads to A LOT of bench time for employees at the bottom. 

During recruiting events they preach that everyone is going to be constantly busy and constantly involved in important client engagements from day one. That was not the case for me and many of my peers. Bench time was as long as 5-9 weeks for many people and the work that you are involved in is not consistent with what is "sold" in recruiting (on the finance side there is far more emphasis on regulatory reporting and compliance, which is danced around during recruiting events). The recruiting teams also emphasize the ability to try new things, but that is lost in translation as you go up the chain of command (manager - partner level). Many get stuck doing the same or similar work for years and end up pigeon-holed into a specific practice at the end of the "rotational" program because they weren't able to gain different perspectives from other practices. The strategy practice, for example, hires primarily from other strategy firms (think BCG, McKinsey, etc.) and doesn't keep many opportunities open for staff consultants to be involved.