PwC UK received 60,000 applications for its 2,000 entry-level places as graduates hunt for white-collar jobs, according to the Financial Times.
Phillippa O’Connor, chief people officer at PwC UK, told the FT that the 35% increase in grad applications has allowed the firm to “raise the bar” and select candidates able to deliver higher value work.
She claimed the Big 4 firm had chosen not to replace or offshore some routine work as it wanted junior staff to learn to see subjectivity, for example in auditing accounts that “could look black and white to an AI machine”.
PwC acknowledged it has been “removing lower-value activities” as technology and AI evolve, but O’Connor added: “When we did the strategic workforce planning, there’s a version of that pyramid where you take out a bigger component of the bottom of the pyramid. And then you look forward three to five years and say, ‘What will be the skills that our then managers have that we don’t think are automatable? How will we have trained those?’”
Recent graduate intakes have been a couple of hundred smaller than in the past, she said. But the cuts in jobs across PwC UK over the past year were more about the state of the UK market than the immediate impact of AI.
