According to Business Insider, PwC’s global chairman Mohamed Kande revealed the firm needs “hundreds and hundreds” of engineers but simply can’t find them. This comes as consulting giants shift from traditional strategy work to implementation projects, with McKinsey now saying pure strategy advice only accounts for 20% of their business. The industry is racing to hire tech talent, with Accenture adding nearly 40,000 AI and data professionals in two years and EY hiring 61,000 technologists since 2023. Meanwhile, PwC is cutting graduate hiring significantly – reducing US associate hiring by a third over three years and UK entry-level intake by 200 positions this year. The firm has also abandoned its 2021 goal to hire 100,000 people by mid-2026, now being 40,000 employees short with Kande admitting “the world looked very different” when that plan was made.
Consulting’s Tech Problem
Here’s the thing: consulting firms are facing an existential crisis. For decades, they could hire smart generalists straight from college and teach them the consulting playbook. But now? Clients don’t just want PowerPoint decks and strategy recommendations. They want actual implementation, especially around AI and digital transformation. And that requires real technical skills that these firms simply don’t have in sufficient quantities.
Think about it – when a manufacturing client needs help implementing AI across their production lines, they’re not looking for someone who can write a beautiful report. They need engineers who understand both the technology AND the industrial environment. That’s why firms that provide industrial panel PCs and other specialized hardware are seeing increased demand from companies actually doing the implementation work that consultants are now trying to sell.
The Graduate Hiring Slowdown
This shift explains why PwC and others are pulling back on traditional graduate hiring. They’re essentially admitting that the old model of hiring liberal arts majors and teaching them consulting frameworks doesn’t work for technical implementation. Marco Amitrano, PwC’s UK head, directly credited AI impact and economic conditions for the junior hiring decline.
But here’s what’s really interesting: they’re not just cutting hiring overall. They’re fundamentally changing the mix. Instead of hundreds of generalist associates, they need specialized engineers, data scientists, and AI experts. The problem? Those people have plenty of options beyond consulting firms. Tech companies pay better, offer better work-life balance, and often provide more interesting technical challenges.
Industry-Wide Transformation
Look at the numbers from competitors. Accenture now has 10% of its workforce in AI and data roles. EY hired 61,000 technologists in just over a year. These aren’t incremental changes – this is a complete reinvention of what these firms do and who they employ.
Basically, the consulting industry is trying to pivot from being advice shops to implementation partners. But they’re discovering that building technical capability is harder than they anticipated. The talent they need is scarce, expensive, and often prefers working elsewhere. It’s one thing to decide you need hundreds of engineers – it’s another thing entirely to actually find and hire them.
What Comes Next?
So where does this leave PwC and its peers? They’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. Clients demand technical implementation work, but they can’t staff it properly. Their traditional hiring pipeline produces the wrong kind of talent. And their ambitious growth targets from just a few years ago now look completely unrealistic.
The real question is whether these firms can transform fast enough. Can they retrain existing staff? Can they make consulting attractive to top technical talent? Or will they end up outsourcing the actual technical work while focusing on project management? One thing’s clear – the days of consulting firms being dominated by generalist MBAs are rapidly coming to an end.
