Company: EY
Date: 2015-05-30
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Advisory, Senior Manager, IT Risk & Assurance
Pros: - Great, international networking
- Opportunities to travel to countries in the region (Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong) for leadership meetings, teaming events, or short-term secondments
- Partners can offer adjunct, specialised roles that attract additional, positive optics leading to increased responsibility such as practice management & development, mentoring people, business management, creating bridges between several EY countries and member firms.
- Senior manager role is well respected within the firm
- People leaving the organisation often leap-frog into higher roles with remuneration multiplying, in part due to the successful training and culture of EY, i.e. Perception of ex-EY people can be better than the other Big 4
- Significant technology/platform upgrades in recent years position the organisation for better collaboration and sharing of knowledge
Cons: - Customers sometimes steers to less appropriate products and services
- Favouritism can arise in client engagement teams in selecting those that do not challenge the status who, excluding other people with more experience
- At the senior manager level, counsellors are 1-2 grade higher and thus can be frequently unavailable or so busy they neglect promises to promote a senior manager's abilities
- A senior manager driving driving a client opportunity pursuit may face it taken over by a Senior Manager Grade 4 (director) once the dollar value rises; misplaced credit for "the win" 
- People given specialist roles can later get "thrown under the bus" at mid- and year-end performance reviews, i.e. Time spent successfully delivering on practice and people management is discarded at year end performance reviews, in favour of meeting high revenue and utilisation targets
- People can suddently "disappear" due to attribution and/or those in senior roles (senior manager through partner) can be "performance managed" out of the organisation using so-called discretionary employment agreements to skirt labour laws; changing a person's client assignments to less consequential accounts from which revenue targets are near impossible to achieve, or freezing wages