i am thinking of entering the consulting worldErnst & Young:What are they good at? what do they specialise in? how do they compare to their competition??it says on their websites that they do pretty much everything(as you would expect), but from some other research they seem very IT/implementation as opposed to strategy focused??yes/no?

asda and young are probably the weakest of the big4 accounting advisory firms.They pay slightly more than PWC or KPMG, but they need to. The quality of staff and work is very poor

"Good" at nothing - "scraping through" on almost anything. It's bargain bucket consulting, although not such a bargain when everything needs to be triple-staffed and repeated seven times to produce a passable result. Avoid.

I sure hope for you that you will not base your decision on what we have to say on this site.You will occasionally get a genuine advice, even at times based on a robust set of facts but more often than not you get the above.You can only be wary of people who make grand statements such as the quality of staff and work is poor.It is a firm with over 140,000 employees in over 140 countries - if the standard of work was poor, it would not be that successful.So here are my facts:Nice officeFar more global than its [big 4] peers due to its regional structureProjects are abundant but as always it depends of your service line - areas of strength for EY are Finance and procurement/ supply chain as well as transaction servicesCulture is far more empathetic to personal circumstances than ACN for instanceEY strategy is to position itself in between corp strategy [MBBB] and implementation [cap, ACN]. Advisory is fast growing [faster than a lot of its peers e.g. KPMG] and therefore appetite to promote rapidly and recruit is highoverall a good place to work. a lot of people are ex ACN, MBBB, PWCNo matter what you hear, the best thing you can do is meet people from each firm you are interested in joining - then make your mind up

I am with Ernest, the comments from "NotEY" and "Plague" seem malicious and uninformed. Probably from recruitment agents, rather than anyone who works in consulting I dont work for EY, or any of the other 3, but as an outsider looking at the Big 4 consulting market I wouldnt put EY as fourth, as they are achieving strong organic growth and is more globalised than the othersTo your point Deloitte do much more IT implementation than any of the others.

I've worked with some E&Y guys are they were excellent. They brought both professionalism and humour to a really tough project. The client couldn't have been more pleased with their work. Perhaps that's why they got a large non-compete extension

EY are very patchy in terms of quality of staff. They go through cycles of huge hiring and then laying off droves of staff. Not an outfit that I'd join.

Thanks anona, when did EY Advisory last lay anyone off please?

My wife was let go of EY last year. They downsized their IT security team as despite being highly valued they were just not being charged out full time all of the time. Since the IT consulting has been taken over by the ex-accenture 'business' consultants its a body shopping outfit. If you are not working on a large programme (mostly government) then forget about job security