Company: EY
Date: 2014-03-10
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Good on the CV but thats it
Pros: Great reputation. 

Thats all they have going for them. really it is. reputations is why they have grads lining up out of the door to get hired by them but almost all leave as soon as they are qualified. but thats no problem because they have another endless line of grads wanting to join!
Cons: Worked in the Luton office for 5 years. 

-long hrs
-no social life
-poor career progression: its all politics. who you know rather than what you know
-poor training: seriously why the hell are ex-big4 seen as so good. it wasnt until I joined a top 20 accountancy practice did i realise how little big4 graduates actually know about accounting. skill set you develop at EY is actually pretty narrow although perfectly suited for them. but when you get to a different firm you realise how well rounded other accountancy grads are and how poorly trained and narrow you are. Told by several recruitment agencies  that a lot of practices particularly smaller practices prefer not to take on ex-big4 staff. 
- bad pay!!! I make 30% more doing the same job with better hrs at a top 20 firm than at EY
-bland uninteresting work colleagues. they all come from the same types of background. work parties were an endless boring pain
-EVERYONE seems fake
- really bad career management. trying to move up the company is not easy. very competitive with few opening and lots of grads going after them. creates a culture of staff ALWAYS under charging their time, under mining and back chatting about other colleagues, taking on unreasonable about of extra work to try and stand out and allowing managers to take advantage of them to show how much they "enjoy" the "challenge" of the extra work load
- ENDLESS amount of admin, forms to fill in, surveys needing to be filled out by other departments, feed back request, POINTLESS training on the other side of London at peak work times that you HAVE to attend. Honestly i spent over 3hrs a days on admin on top of my ever increasing work load.