Company: EY
Date: 2018-11-01
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

PAS - London is toxic, avoid like the plague if you value your well being
Pros: The EY global brand and prestige
Cons: Work days are long. They say 9-5 but really its 9-8 so forget about having a social or family life. If you have kids seriously dont apply or if you do make sure you say you wont do overtime and make sure its in your contract.

You could get the job done within the working hours but everything has to be reviewed by a manager. Every single email. Managers usually complete their work first and start reviewing yours at 5:30 so you have to stay late waiting for them. Because of this everyone is burnt out.

EYs systems are archaic with a cray amount of admin as a lot of work is farmed out to India. You have to waste a lot of time emailing India rather than getting on with your work because there is no case management system. There is also no precedent bank so there is a lot of inconsistency and a lot of inefficiency.

There is also no training whatsoever. You get the legal and regulatory mandatory training for 2 days when you first join but then there is no training on their internal systems. At EY you learn by mistakes. Managers are too busy trying to meet their own billing targets to train. They want people who can hit the ground running, so if you are coming here for personal development you wont get it. 

Promotions require at least 1 year of service so its better to interview at the level you want rather than progressing internally.

There is a lot of office politics and sometimes it feels like you are back in school. People dont work to help each other here. If they can they will throw you under the bus for any little thing so really watch your back and keep copies of emails.

Its a toxic culture. Entry level staff are nice but as you go up the ladder they are all on some ego trip and seem to have lost their soul. I realised this on the first day!

If you really need the prestige of working for EY then I would say you need to be young, without commitments and have no social life. Even then I dont think you would want to be there for longer than 6 months as the people and internal politics does wear you down mentally.

Hopefully I can help someone. If I had read a review like this I would not have interviewed for the role and would have rather worked for a high street firm because the pay is not worth it.