While intern season is wrapping up and interns are shedding tears over a lack of feedback while they sweat it out waiting for return offers that seem to take longer and longer to arrive as the years go by, Business Insider has published another article giving the outside world an exclusive look into how Big 4 is changing in the age of AI (and offshoring…it’s mostly offshoring changing how the ladder works these days). If that premise sounds familiar, you may have seen this story in the Monday Morning Accounting News Brief. We thought it deserves its own spot in the story carousel given how significant a change this is to how internships work at EY.
The long and short of it is that this intern season is probably the last “traditional” intern season in assurance. Because things are changing so quickly (read into that what you will), EY is moving from 8 weeks of interning –> offer to a “Career Residency” that stretches for 8 to 12 months during which time the younguns are trained up on more than just how to stay busy and not annoy the people above you in a completely foreign environment.
Wrote BI:
Participants will remain employed part-time, work remotely on EY projects, receive personalized coaching, and participate in skills development before potentially joining the firm full-time.
EY is launching the residency as AI reshapes the skills entry-level workers need and pushes firms to rethink how quickly new hires can contribute.
“Professional services is really changing at a rapid pace right now, and the workforce is changing right alongside it,” Ginnie Carlier, EY Americas’ chief talent and culture officer, told Business Insider. Workers, she added, are increasingly looking for employers that can “help them stay relevant and grow.”
The important bit:
The Career Residency will initially launch for interns working on assurance, who typically intern during the winter or summer before their senior year. Participants will continue taking college classes while working part-time for EY during their senior year.
EY thinks the extended incubation period will help them help newbies develop skills like “judgment, professional skepticism, critical thinking, collaboration, and communication through simulations and real-world EY work.”
There will evidently be little change to the application process and it sounds like there will still be a chance not to receive an offer at the end of it. But if residents make it through all that and secure an offer, BI said that “[o]ffers will also include a pay bump that will depend on performance, business needs, and completion of the residency’s criteria and assessments.”
We’re curious how this all will work. Will the interns residents get personally trained up in the art of critical thinking by specialized resident-wranglers or will overworked managers get stuck with them and plop them in front of computers to watch a bunch of training all day?
Assuming this works out well, we suppose it’s nice that firms are starting to think about how to train up the next generation, something that should have been completely thought out before they started sending all their busy work overseas.