Company: PwC
Date: 2010-02-18
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

Nice place to get a professional qualification, but not much after that.
Pros: Good work life balance, colleagues are very friendly, work is very easy to pick up for a new graduate and of course you get an ACA or other qualification while you're there.

Great place to pick up some soft skills, as you are in contact with clients every day.
Cons: The work gets very repetitive and boring after a few months, by the end of your 3 year training contract you will not be as clever or as sharp as when you came out of uni, and this may hinder your future job prospects. My advice for people thinking of using PwC as a stepping stone to move into IB or investment management would be to make sure you do some extra reading on the side and not get sucked into audit too much.

Feedback process is a joke. People who are rated highly are the ones who either work on the large busy season clients (where you are probably working until 12am) or the ones whose managers can be bothered to write anything. Way too much jumping through hoops and it is difficult to gain recognition if you are not working on the right clients.

But the worst thing about working at PwC is that there is absolutely no incentive to go the extra mile, e.g. if you finish an audit early on a smaller client and ask the manager for extra work, most of the time you will get bits of admin work and photocopying, etc. When it comes to review time, your timesheet will show that you have been doing nothing for a few days and this will work against your utilisation. So most of the time it is much better to keep quiet and pad out your time so that you finish the audit right on time.