Big 4 advisory vs consulting: a guide for students

To get the low-down on how advisory and consulting differ at the Big 4 firms (Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC), we consulted people from the firms and dug around to find answers.

Deloitte

At Deloitte, consulting and advisory are two separate things. At Deloitte, consulting and advisory are two separate things. Here's how the firm officially categorizes their global service offerings:

As you can see, there's "Financial Advisory" and "Risk Advisory", which are separate services from "Consulting." In the US, both risk and financial advisory fall under one wing called "Risk & Financial Advisory" or (RFA).

Advisory tends to be more specialized and focuses on preventative work. Here's how one former junior consultant explains it.

So there are four main offerings at Deloitte, including advisory and consulting which are two distinct offerings.

• There's Audit and Tax. That's the accounting side of the firm, which it has its own established book of business (clients) and is very rigid in what it can do because of relevant laws and regulations.
• Then there's Consulting, which at Deloitte mostly involves managing and delivering technology-related projects for clients. For example, you might help clients adopt new enterprise software, update old tech infrastructure, or make them a customized tech platform to meet their specific needs. I mostly helped manage these sorts of projects.
• Finally, there's Advisory which is closer to consulting than accounting but still a different offering.  When I was at the firm, it was called "RFA," short for "Risk & Financial Advisory."

Advisory tends to be a more specialized group of people. Someone who works in cyber advisory, for instance, would know the latest government standards and best practices in that field and have certain certifications. As a graduate hire, this doesn't mean you need to already have the right background or certifications – they'll hire generalists and get you certified.

To my knowledge, advisory does more preventative work. So you help prevent problems, unlike consulting where the client comes to you with a problem and you help solve it.

For example, let's say McDonald's wants to prevent a breach. They might hire the advisory team to do the preventative work, which means auditing their tech platforms and uncovering vulnerabilities and potential problems! For example, if a random employee happened to have access to all employees' social security numbers, that would be an issue.

But they also do retroactive work, such as auditing a company's expense transactions to prevent fraud, abuse, waste, etc.

Once I worked side by side with an advisory team on a project. The client hired Deloitte for software implementation and we (in consulting) would pass the work to advisory so they could check for things like SOX compliance (which might mean making sure the software is secure and up-to-standard when it handles financial data) or that no password sharing was happening. So they made sure we were doing our job correctly basically!

– Former junior consultant @ Deloitte

EY

At all other Big 4 firms, consulting and advisory are used interchangeably.

At EY, "advisory" and "consulting" are synonymous. Advisory is what our consulting practice used to be called before it was rebranded to Consulting. – Consulting manager @ EY

For reference, here are all of EY's service offerings:

KPMG

At KPMG, the consulting arm of the firm is called advisory. Here's how they break down their service offerings on their website.

For more context:

If you really want to be nuanced, KPMG Consulting was the entity split off from KPMG LLP in the 90’s. It was publicly traded and later changed its name to BearingPoint. BearingPoint went bankrupt in the late 2000s.

KPMG Advisory was the restart of KPMG Consulting in KPMG LLP after the non-compete expired with BearingPoint. Some people refer to advisory as KPMG Consulting but it’s not the name we use externally to go to market. – Director @ KPMG

You can think of KPMG's consulting offering as a popular café that closed down, then reopened under a different name but with similar coffee and cakes. They want to be known by their new name ("Advisory"), even though people might still use the old name ("Consulting") when talking about it.

PwC

At PwC in the US, there's just consulting. Here's how their service offerings look:

However, different offices around the world are organized in different ways. For example, PwC India has two separate service offerings called "Accounting Advisory" and "Consulting" and in PwC Rwanda, Consulting services fall under Advisory.

What next? 

There are some more technical distinctions between advisory and consulting, which My Consulting Offer explains really well: 

But for now, just know that the terms used depend on the firm and it's really only at Deloitte where the distinction really matters.

We hope this gives you a better idea of what it's like to work at the Big 4. And if you're still on the hunt for a promising opportunity, check out all the internships we have in accounting and consulting!