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What Time Zone are you in?
Is the rug being pulled out from under S&O?
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Equivalent to entry level SM at EY.
Uh no
Like a senior SM
Equivalent to SM2-5+ at Deloitte / EY
EYP has Director which = Manager
It’s a difficult question to answer. A better question would be “what is the average YoE for each rank per business line?”.
The answer to that question will get you closer to the equivalents and inform you on where you will land given your own profile.
I’ve seen Directors here cross over as SMs and MDs. I’ve also seen SMs here cross over to SMs and even Ms.
Point is that your YoE is a stronger determining factor in than your current rank at a firm as it relates to what you “qualify” for. This applies to every industry. I’ve seen a Director here who was accelerated with 8 YOE leave for a VP role at a big bank. That VP role is equipment of M and he took a pay cut. He told me he couldn’t find anything else and left because he didn’t want to deal with rev goals. He realized how he didn’t know anything except how to put together slide decks and Flex budgets and bombed in several leadership and technical role interviews.
So, lesson learned is even if you use YOE, we have to be specific on what we spent those years doing. This Director is a friend of mine and he does regret pivoting out of business development roles because if he stayed put he’d be making 50% more compared to what he makes now. And no, it’s been 3 years since he moved and he hasn’t been promoted because he’s still learning the industry. Funny thing is he’s trying to pivot back into Big Four and he’s not getting responses for Director level but SM. A recruiter told him it’s because his recent experience wasn’t lined up against those applying against him where they all have continuous business development experience at 15+ YoE.
The core take away is that firms don’t hire solely based on qualifications, but they hire the BEST candidate given the scope of work and responsibilities in the JD. So, our goal shouldn’t be to use YOE or a Rank to determine if we’re the BEST candidate (or even qualified) for the role we are applying to.
I progressed from SA to M to SM to Director in under five years in strategy consulting. In my view, “years of experience” is often used as a yardstick to normalize slower timelines—your real constraints are your skillset and your willingness to push for promotion.
Think of Managing Director as a non-equity Partner which is a mandatory step at both EY (recent change) and KPMG before Partner.
Deloitte and PwC have more steps at lower levels. So to answer your question directly - a PwC Director is arguably a more senior level than SM at EY; SD at EYP, or SM at KPMG because it’s one step below Partner compared to two for the firms above.
When I started in Consulting 25 years ago, every Big 4 had the same 5 levels - Consultant, Senior Consultant, Manager, Senior Manager, and PP. All more or less had the same time in level standards (2 years to make SC, 2-3 years to M, 2-3 years to SM, and then 4-5 years to make Partner). They've all added levels and tried to obfuscate as much as possible over the years since then.