EY Tells Junior Consultants Remote Work Is Not the Route to Success While 53% of Gen Z Disagree

EY has told the Financial Times that remote working is holding back its junior consultants, in an interview reported by Personnel Today on August 28. The argument is specific and worth understanding rather than dismissing. As artificial intelligence absorbs routine analytical work, the skills that distinguish a consultant become the human ones, and the firm's position is that those are not learned at home. Importantly, EY has not changed its work from home policy. Partners are asking rather than mandating. At Metaintro, we think a nudge with a reason attached deserves more attention than a mandate without one.

What Exactly Did EY Say?

UK head of consulting Sayeh Ghanbari told the FT she had witnessed a change in recent years where people have set up their lives to be at home a lot, and that this is just not the route to success in the world of AI. The phrasing matters. It is not a productivity claim and not a monitoring argument. It is a claim about career trajectory, aimed at people early enough in their careers for the trajectory to still be forming.

She went further on what the job is becoming. With AI increasingly performing routine tasks, she argued, human consultants need to be good at what they are really good at, which is to be human, and that this cannot be achieved through remote work. Whether or not you accept the conclusion, the premise is one the market broadly agrees with, which is that the analytical layer of consulting is the layer AI reaches first.

Is This a Return to Office Mandate?

No, and the distinction is the most useful thing in the story. Personnel Today reports that EY has not made any formal changes to its work from home policy. Instead, partners have been asked to remind younger consultants that meaningful time spent together in the office could aid their personal development.

That is a materially different instrument from the mandates that have dominated the last two years, which we have covered in cases like JPMorgan's return to office mandate and the pushback it drew and Fidelity ending hybrid work. A mandate makes attendance a compliance question. A nudge framed around your own advancement makes it a career question, and career questions are harder to argue with because refusing carries a cost you cannot appeal.

Be clear eyed about that. Advice from partners about what aids your development is not neutral information in a firm where partners decide promotions. We looked at the wider dynamic in why RTO mandates read as lazy leadership, and the softer version deserves the same scrutiny even when the reasoning is better.

What Is KPMG Doing Differently?

KPMG is approaching the same problem from the training side rather than the attendance side. UK head of advisory Callum Licence told the FT that while the benefits of AI will enable more efficient working and a different kind of role over the long term, the human benefits of connectivity and interaction will always remain. The firm is experimenting with new approaches to in-person training to support the development of soft skills.

That is the more interesting response, because it puts the burden on the employer to design the development rather than on the employee to absorb it by proximity. Sitting in an office does not automatically build interpersonal skill. Structured in-person training might. If your firm is asking you to come in for your own development, the fair question back is what specifically has been designed, and KPMG's approach is the benchmark to hold them to.

Do Junior Employees Actually Agree?

Largely not, and the gap is wide. A report by Diamond Interiors found that more than half of Gen Z employees, at 53 percent, feel more productive working from home. So the group being asked to come in is the group most convinced it performs better where it already is.

The complication is that both things can be true. Productivity on your current tasks and development of the skills that get you promoted are different measures, and remote work may serve one while hindering the other. That is the honest version of this debate, and it rarely gets stated because each side prefers its own metric. Personnel Today also notes that a number of recent studies have reflected higher levels of loneliness among younger workers seeking more connection, which sits uncomfortably beside the productivity finding.

We covered the same tension from the other direction in why remote work is hurting junior hiring more than AI is, and the mental health dimension in the silent crisis that RTO cannot fix.

Why Are Consulting Firms Feeling This First?

Because consulting sells judgment and relationships, and it prices juniors on the promise that they will develop both. The industry noticed that the cohort of school leavers and graduates who joined during the pandemic were slower to develop softer skills than earlier intakes who had not been working from home. That observation, whether or not it survives closer study, is now shaping hiring and development policy across the large firms.

It also arrives while the same firms are cutting entry level intake, which is the context that makes this more than an office debate. We have tracked PwC reducing advisory hiring from 72 offices to 13, McKinsey layoffs as AI reaches white collar consulting and BCG drawing a quarter of revenue from AI work. Fewer junior roles and a higher bar for the ones that remain is the environment this advice lands in, and it explains why the advice has teeth.

Is the Human Skills Argument Actually Right?

Partly, and it is worth separating the defensible claim from the convenient one. The defensible claim is that AI is compressing the value of routine analysis, so the differentiated work moves toward client relationships, judgment under ambiguity and persuasion. That is consistent with what we found across the market in why mentoring matters more in the AI era and in the finding that cutting junior talent backfires.

The convenient claim is that office attendance is the mechanism that produces those skills. That step is asserted rather than demonstrated. Proximity creates opportunity for observation and informal learning, but it does not guarantee it, and plenty of people have spent years in offices without acquiring any of it. The evidence we do have points at relationships rather than rooms, which is why informal mentorships beat formal programs in the research on career growth.

There is also a supply side point that goes unmentioned. If the mentors are senior people who are themselves hybrid, going into the office does nothing unless the people worth learning from are there on the same days. Attendance without coordination produces a quiet room and a commute.

The pandemic cohort comparison deserves a similar caution. That group did not only work remotely, they also entered during a period of disrupted client work, frozen travel and unusual project mixes, so attributing their slower skills development to the location alone isolates one variable from several. It may still be the right explanation. It has not been shown to be, and a firm with a preference for office attendance is not a neutral party in deciding.

What Happens to the Junior Role If AI Takes the Routine Work?

This is the question underneath the office debate, and it is the one that actually determines careers. Traditionally a junior consultant earned their standing by doing volume, which meant the research, the model building, the deck production and the analysis that nobody senior wanted to do. That work was tedious, but it was also how you learned the business, and it bought you the right to be in the room.

If AI performs a large share of that, the apprenticeship loses its content. The firm still needs the output, but it no longer needs a person to produce it, which removes the mechanism that used to convert a graduate into a practitioner. Telling that graduate to come into the office does not by itself restore the missing work. It simply relocates them, and a relocated gap is still a gap.

That is why the KPMG approach of designing in person training reads as the more serious answer. It accepts that if the old learning path has been automated away, a new one has to be built deliberately rather than assumed. Firms that only address the location question are solving the easier half of the problem and leaving the harder half to chance, and the cost of that lands on the cohort currently entering.

There is a commercial dimension too. A junior who cannot bill routine analysis has to justify their cost some other way, which pushes firms toward hiring fewer, more expensive and more senior people. That is precisely the pattern showing up in entry level intake across the sector, and it is the reason this is not merely a debate about desks. The question of where juniors sit is downstream of the question of whether the junior role survives in its current shape, and only one of those is being discussed openly.

What Does This Mean for Your Career Right Now?

If you are early career in a professional services firm, treat this as information about how you will be assessed rather than as a scheduling debate. The people who decide your progression have said publicly that they associate in person presence with development. That belief will shape reviews whether or not it is correct, so the pragmatic move is to be visible on the days that matter rather than to maximize total days.

Be strategic about which days. Coordinate with the senior people you want to learn from, because the entire value proposition depends on who else is in the building. Two well chosen days with your project lead present beats four days of sitting near people at your own level. Ask directly which days your team leads are in, and treat that as the schedule.

Ask what the firm is actually providing. KPMG is designing in-person training rather than assuming osmosis, and that is a reasonable thing to request. If the answer is that nothing specific has been designed, then the ask is for your attendance rather than for your development, and you are entitled to know which one it is. Asking the question politely also signals that you take your own progression seriously, which is rarely held against anyone.

Build the human skills deliberately rather than passively. Client exposure, running a workstream, presenting to people more senior than you and handling a difficult conversation are the things being described as career defining. Those are all requestable. If AI is taking the routine analysis that used to fill a junior year, the replacement has to be scoped for you or claimed by you, and nobody hands it over unprompted.

Finally, weigh the tradeoff honestly for your own circumstances. Fifty three percent of your peers believe they work better at home, and they may well be right about output while being wrong about advancement. Those are different questions and you get to answer both. At Metaintro, we would rather you choose your attendance with a reason than default to either extreme.

Related Articles

• Big Firms Push RTO While Startups Scoop Up Young Workers
• Will AI Kill the Return to Office Push
• The AI Access Gap, Junior Staff and the Tools They Are Not Given
• AI and Junior White Collar Jobs in London
• KPMG and EY Partner Demotions and the End of the Job for Life
• Gen Z and Workplace Learning and Development
• Hushed Hybrid, the Quiet Work Trend
• Soft Skills Examples
• The Shrinking 45 to 64 Workforce and the Mentorship Gap
• PwC Graduate Hiring Surge and Young Job Seekers

People Also Asked

Q: Has EY actually mandated a return to the office?

A: No. Personnel Today reports that EY has made no formal changes to its work from home policy. Partners have been asked to remind younger consultants that meaningful time spent together in the office could aid their personal development, which is encouragement rather than a requirement.

Q: Why do consulting firms link AI to office attendance?

A: The argument is that AI is absorbing routine analytical work, so the differentiating skills become interpersonal ones, and those firms believe such skills develop through in person collaboration. The first half of that argument is widely accepted. The second half, that attendance is the mechanism, is asserted rather than proven.

Q: Do younger employees think they work better from home?

A: Most say yes. A Diamond Interiors report found 53 percent of Gen Z employees feel more productive working from home. Other recent studies have found higher loneliness among younger remote workers, so productivity and development may be pulling in different directions for the same group.

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