Offers a lot of flexibility with career and work-life balance
Pros
EY offers a lot of flexibility for its people in terms of your own work-life balance and your own career model. A lot of emphasis is placed upon individuals to take responsibility for their own careers, but there is good support available - you just need to remember to ask for it. There are many opportunities to really push yourself and to expand into new areas of work, should you wish it, and once you understand how the 'system' works you can go on to have a very successful career with them. EY are constantly trying to improve themselves, and pride themselves on high levels of staff engagement around key issues.
Cons
Having been with EY for many years it is easy to see that in the UK the firm has become very London centric in its outlook and strategy. This is fine if you live and work in London, but not so good if you don't. Opportunities for progression mainly exist in London and certainly moving past Senior Manager is difficult unless you are willing to spend considerably more time in London. The pay at EY has been below market averages for many years now, despite protestations that it is benchmarked against other Big 4. What EY conveniently forgets is that many other organisations pay a lower basic salary, but then compensate with a meaningful bonus scheme. At EY the bonus scheme is a token gesture only, and has typically been very low in value. Whether this situation will improve in the near future or not is difficult to tell. EY are also quite good at taking its staff for granted, and when people leave there is almost a shrugging of shoulders and thinking about recruit to replace, rather than dealing with the issues that led people to leave in the first place. Over time these attitudes have led to a worsening in the 'people culture' that EY used to be so proud of, and the focus now is more on productivity metrics, cost cutting and removing the fun out of the work. Overall a great place to start a career, which can last for many years, but be careful about how long you think you can stay around for.