Vacation time?

Analyst 1 in IB - Gen

I was wondering if consultants get more vacation than bankers, or if both have pretty sparse vacation days? Family is quite important to me and so while I realize that work hours are demanding, and am fine with that, I do want to be able to get away and spend time with family.

I realize you just grind through the first years and the goal is to graduate into something more sustainable/enjoyable/etc (subjective, of course), but am trying to figure out what the other careers are which may accommodate such a balance, so that I can think about the new few years of my career.

Not sure if you have a family or not, but I wouldn’t focus on vacation time as the metric here. Even as you become more senior vacation time is only 4 weeks or so, it really isn’t enough time to “be with family”. Not trying to tell you how to live, and you might have a different perspective, but I would focus on overall work life balance, specifically what that’ll be like around the age you are hoping to have a family (if you don’t have one already). As an example, consulting can be very travel intensive (tbd if COVID has made permanent changes to this or not), so you are looking at 0 family time during the week (except over calls/FaceTime). Similarly, banking requires a lot of “in office” time, that means you are missing your child’s bedtime basically every night (unless you have the option to wfh a bit). 

I would start this from the other side:

1) what are the most important things for you in life? Is it a career? Family? Having lots of money? Try to figure out the ranking of these things.

2) with that ranking, what do you want life to feel like when you have kids? Want to have date nights with your partner? Want to be there for breakfast and dinner? Think about the across the different ages (sports when they are in school?). 

3) use that to help determine what career paths are viable, starting with my bullet point #1 (what are the most important things for you). That isn’t to say all careers are possible or that you are even interested in them, but in life there are many trade offs, try to make them in a way that is planned and deliberate. 

4) remember that even within industries firms can have very different cultures. Look for places that line up with how you want things to work, in the HF space I’ve talked to many different firms and there are some I wouldn’t get anywhere near, they just don’t match the way I want my life to be. So when I say find the career path it’s a mix of industry and firm; you can’t just use industries as a proxy for what will work for you  

To your vacation question, at the senior levels it is pretty similar, but there is also a difference between policy (how many days you get) and company culture. There are many variables you need to consider, so I wouldn’t look at average days of a vacation policy in any real way.