EY Leadership Academy Review

Really enjoyed it. It didn't feel like work at all. Everyone there was so friendly, other candidates and EY people alike. There was not a single person I did not enjoy talking to. Day time activities were all team based with little to no writing and the evenings offered time to socialise in the bar with EY paying for the bar tab.

EY did not get anything from us during the course. The whole time was just spent trying to improve us as leaders and in a team. They clearly put a lot of money and time into making this event happen and the only they get out is the possibility that we will work there in the future.

The whole time each task was explained clearly before we did them and there was always the opportunity to ask questions if you didn't understand. All the tasks were done in a team who you worked with throughout the course, and in that team you had an EY mentor who oversaw you the whole time and if ever you had questions they would happily answer if you didn't want to ask in front of everyone.

I really am not the kind of person that believes it is possible to learn team work skills and leadership type things in a short space of time. I think it takes time to build these kind of skills and abilities with lots of time to alter things slightly and find out what works. However, because on this course you spend so much time working in a team and acting as a leader with feedback after every single task from your mentor and team mates, you do learn a lot. While I don't feel I learnt any new skills as such, finding out what I can improve on and having so many chances to practice changing those things and direct feedback on how successfully you made those changes is not something I feel you get very often. While you can experiment with different things in a team at uni etc. you can only test how successful things were based on the task outcome, having feedback from your team mates was new and I think really did help and I will take things on board that we learnt. However, there was one type of feedback used which was called "coaching". This involved us getting one on one a session with out team's EY mentor at the end of each day. When I heard that I was really looking forward to that as I thought it would give them a chance to be more honest than they had been in front of everyone else. However, it was a counselling style sessions with them asking open questions trying to steer you to the answers. While I appreciate that this will work for a lot of people, and coming to the answers yourself may, in some cases, make the answer stick more firmly, I think once we had tried that out on the first day, from then on it would have been nice to have the choice between "coaching" or a more traditional one on one feedback session more like parents evening.

Really well. There was a clear plan for everyday with things for each task which were kept to and were accurate for how long things would take. There were no times where we were sitting around. My only criticism would have been that we had possibly too long for lunch and not enough time between the end of the day's tasks and dinner/evening socialising. The may have been more a problem for me than others as I chose to socialise from the start of dinner until bed every day which meant there was no real chances to get a nap in. My other criticism was that it was all kept very secretive up until about an hour before things happened. While this wasn't a really big problem, it may have made packing easier and just for a bit of piece of mind to know what was happening. My final point on the structure would be how the only written task was done. We were given a case study to read and questions to answer on it in 40 minutes. I felt that this structure meant that being a fast.slow reader had a disproportionate affect on your performance in the task compared to what I believe they were really looking which was our ability to find key information in text and analyse it. I feel that being given the case study the night before and just the questions at the start of the task, and then maybe 25 minutes for the task maybe would have been a better way to access us. However, if it was our reading speed they wanted to access then it was perfect. I would like to stress that while I have mentioned a few things that I would have liked to have been done differently, quite literally everything I haven't mentioned was spot on.

Friendly, relaxed and fun. I'm not quite sure how they managed it, but everyone who was on the course was incredibly friendly and easy to get on with. This made the whole thing a lot more enjoyable. They made it clear from the start that we weren't in competition with each other as there were places on internships etc. in the future than there were of us on the course and so that made it really relaxed and no one was trying to beat each other for a space. All the EY representatives were friendly and the 'networking' in the evening, was just more of an evening at the pub/having a dinner with fellow students. This meant that when they were overseeing us in the day when we were doing tasks there was very little pressure.

The whole course is about investing in us and developing us. That's the point, so there is no option other than 10 for this. Quite literally 100% of the time was spent on investing in us in people other than when we had to eat and sleep.

This was the only downfall of the course, however it wasn't the point. EY offer a discover EY course and the leadership academy and so it is clear when you apply that if you want to know about EY then go for discover EY. However, they don't let you apply to both and they do make it clear that if you are a strong candidate then the leadership academy is what you should go for. I would have liked it if maybe the course was a day longer and we could have had a day just focusing on EY and the jobs available. Maybe people from EY in each business line could have spent half an hour or so each, giving a presentation about what they actually do day to day, not just what we can find out on the internet about what there role is. There were opportunities to ask people in the evenings what they do, however this was no different from a networking event that you can go to at uni.

We got a lot of time to socialise with the EY representatives and find out what they were like. The fact that they were all similar in the sense that they were easy to get on with, and were friendly showed the company culture was about people. Additionally, the concept of the course being about investing in us as people shows a bit of the company culture. That being said, because it isn't spent in the offices, it may just be the case that they hide you away from the none friendly people at EY and they just let you see there friendliest people. While this will clearly be the case, if the representatives there felt EY didn't have a people culture, they were genuine enough that they would have just been honest about it.

Finding out the company culture I think is key if you have already decided to work at one of the big 4. However, if you weren't sure about working in the big 4 before, this won't help that much, other than showing you the type of people that work at EY. As I mentioned previously, I think maybe a day spent on the jobs at EY and what they are like day to day would have helped with this.

All travel expenses paid up to £100. Accommodation, food and drink paid for throughout the course unless the drinks you wanted were spirits.

Yes, because it was residential with the EY representatives staying in the same hotel every meal and evening was a networking opportunity.

Really good. Talking to the EY people felt like talking to a fellow student at uni or any of the other people on the course. You didn't just have to talk to them about their jobs and they were happy to be brutally honest about their job and makes jokes, drink with you etc.

Only if you asked. As I have mentioned previously, I think it is a shame that doing this means you can't do the discover EY scheme and so having a bit more about EY on the course would have been nice. I appreciate that one of the USPs of the course is that they don't shove EY down your throat, but maybe an extra optional day at the end where they tell you loads about EY would have been nice.

Absolutely. The application really isn't a lot of work like it is for other financial opportunities, it is ridiculously fun, you make really good friends, and they fastrack you onto their other programmes if you want to. By fastrack I mean you don't have to go through the proper application process, just send an email saying which scheme and you will go at least straight to assessment centre, or if you perform well then even further along than that.