How is EY Parthenon in Denmark?

Question

It is for a fresh graduate position and can be compared with the following options: Deloitte Consulting, In house consulting for a large shipping company, and Simon Kucher ( Denmark offices for all these companies). Any insights on the branding, mobility, type of projects, and pay/bonus are much welcome.

To better explain my situation, I am a Non- European wanting to enter into strategy consulting after a master's from the top business school in Denmark. My long-term goal is to stay in the Nordics. And so, I am trying to enter the job market with the best offer at hand.

Answer 1

Hi there,

Not sure if there is a typo in your title – you mentioned EYP there but then you mentioned you have offers from other 3 different companies.

In any case, Deloitte and SK are definitely better than any in-house consulting from a brand point of view. If it is Monitor Deloitte, that would be better than Deloitte only. Within the two, I would check on LinkedIn the one with more alumni in your target exit market (adjusting for the office dimension).

As you probably know, SK is very focused on pricing, so you will specialize in that area earlier (not necessarily a bad thing).

I personally helped people from SK to land offers from MBB so that transition is for sure possible.

Hope this helps,

Francesco

Answer 2

Hello!

Congrats on the offers! :) Not bad as a grad!

In order to offer a good answer, some key questions would need to be answered in your side:

What are your mid and long term goals? to see which offer aligns better with that
What passionates you, consulting or rather industry?

Without knowing those answers, and with the info you could only find in Google, I would go with SK due to their prestige vs. Deloitte. However, if strategy if what you want, perhaps the latter fits you better.

In any case, good news, there is not a bad answer here :)

Hope it helps!

Cheers,

Clara

Answer 3

Hi there,

I don't know the specifics of Denmark, but I can give you my perspective as I worked several years for EY-P and was responsible for the inception of the Lisbon office.

In my opinion, EY-P is a better brand and value proposition. The reason is that when EY bought Parthenon in 2013 it brought its founder Bill Achtmeyer with the deal (which remained leading the practice), and while it did a bit of integration, it respected its culture and practices.

As a side note, Bill led Bain's M&A practice in 1990 and it left when Bain had significant financial problems. So Parthenon's DNA is the same of an MBB.

The result was the value of the “boutique” remained intact. The key partners, consultants, clients, knowledge, systems, processes were there.

Then EY invested in the brand. Investment meaning hiring key teams from MBB, acquiring OC&C and other boutiques in several countries, and using EY's strong foothold in the transaction arena to bring a lot new business.

Only later on it started expanding to new countries and aggressively opening new offices, and did it with “strategy” people. Nowadays, EY is betting strong on EY-Parthenon, bringing in more competences, but usually respecting its DNA as a strategy firm.

I don't think I could tell the same story about Monitor Deloitte. Not about it's DNA, not about it's prestige when it was acquired, not about how succesful the integration was done, not about their hiring practices in a lot of places.

Last but not least, EY-P has a tremendous advantage in the transaction arena, which feeds a lot of strategy business. It is not clear to me what exactly is the advantage for Monitor in the strategy space.

So my guess is that even if EY-P is smaller, it will be more prestigious and grow much faster, which correlated to a steeper career curve.

Having said this, if you still want some details on EY-P practice in Denmark, reach out privately and I will use my network to find out more.