Britain’s leading accountancy firms—Deloitte, EY, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and KPMG—are significantly cutting back on graduate hiring and shifting roles overseas, as the consulting industry faces mounting pressure from advanced artificial intelligence technology and market headwinds. A McKinsey report revealed a dramatic 43 percent drop in UK job vacancies since 2022, with white-collar roles being hit nearly twice as hard as others, a trend reflected in the professional services sector where automation has begun to supplant entry-level positions.
This contraction marks a pivotal shift in an industry previously characterized by a pyramid-shaped workforce heavily reliant on graduate intake. The traditional hierarchy is now giving way to a ´diamond model´ with a broader middle tier, as lower-level roles erode under automation. This year, the big four advertised 44 percent fewer graduate vacancies compared to 2023, with individual firms like PwC and KPMG slashing their graduate cohorts by 6 percent and 29 percent respectively. Senior staff are seeing rising pay, while administrative tasks are increasingly handled offshore in labor markets such as India and the Philippines, expanding a cost-saving trend long present among the largest firms and now catching on with smaller competitors.
In parallel, firms are actively shifting headcount internationally to manage costs, as illustrated by recent figures: Deloitte trimmed its Dutch workforce by 5 percent and grew staff in Malaysia by 9 percent; KPMG cut UK headcount by 7 percent but boosted numbers by 10 percent in Pakistan; EY reduced its German office by 6 percent and increased hiring in Indonesia by 7 percent; and PwC slashed Australian jobs by 18 percent while expanding roles in Mexico by 12 percent. The competitive landscape is intensifying further as private equity aggressively acquires and scales small consultancies, with deal-making in the European accountancy sector rising from 10 to 20 deals pre-2022 to nearly 200 in 2024. Consulting giants such as McKinsey, Boston Consulting Group, and Bain also face similar pressures, as the forces of Artificial Intelligence and market disruption have begun to reshape the very industry that once championed such disruption. For those graduates who do make it through, the nature of the consulting job will likely be unrecognizable from recent years.
