Deloitte UK plans to axe 150 graduate consulting jobs

Deloitte UK plans to axe about 150 junior consulting jobs in two of its consulting teams, even as partners at the firm earned an annual average of more than £1mn last year.

The cuts are part of a wider round of 800 redundancies announced by the Big Four firm in September. An internal presentation to staff delivered last month and seen by the Financial Times shows that first- and second-year analysts in the firm’s consultancy and advisory business will bear the brunt of the reductions.

Early-career hires are set to account for the majority of job losses in some teams, as Deloitte retrenches following a slowdown in demand.

“With the general decline in the market, there has been a decline in the demand for junior grades,” senior partners wrote in the presentation. “We are taking the approach of proposing redundancies at the [first- and second-year graduate] level.”

The firm last month announced the cuts just weeks before reporting average pay of £1.06mn for its partners in the year to May. Deloitte’s partners have been paid an average of more than £1mn in each of the past three years.

Deloitte declined to comment on the graduate job cuts, but said in September that some roles at the firm were at risk of redundancy because of “targeted restructuring” across the business as growth had slowed.

More than 60 per cent of job cuts within “enterprise technology and performance” — part of Deloitte’s UK consulting business focusing on supply chains and IT services — are expected to be made to graduate roles, according to the presentation.

In that team, Deloitte plans to lay off 18 first-year graduates out of 74, and 85 out of 218 second-year graduates.

Within “human capital management” — another subsection of its consulting arm that advises companies on human resources — it plans to fire 45 out of 172 graduates, more than half the total number of lay-offs in the department. In that team, Deloitte will cull 18 out of 51 first-year graduates and 27 out of 121 graduates in their second year.

Graduates who started work in September 2023 will not be affected by the lay-offs, according to the presentation.

The wider programme of redundancies will include employees in business lines other than consulting, meaning that more graduates are likely to be affected, but the FT was unable to obtain full details of the breakdown. A person close to Deloitte said first- and second-year graduate roles did not account for the majority of jobs at risk across the firm.

Deloitte increased its number of client-facing employees to 19,851 last year from 18,163 in 2021, according to the company’s 2022 annual statement, as uncertainty among companies about how to respond to challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic drove a consulting boom.

However, the sector has been hit by rising costs and falling demand from big companies in the past year as the economic environment has become more uncertain. Meanwhile, higher interest rates have put an end to a boom in mergers and acquisitions that drove deal advisory work in previous years.

PwC told its UK staff in June to expect smaller pay rises and bonuses this year. EY said in August it would cut 150 jobs in its UK financial services consulting business. KPMG this week told staff it would fire 110 people in its UK deals business following an earlier announcement of 125 redundancies in its consulting business.