How much better does it get after Associate?
At your firm? For us it gets a lot better.
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Better in terms of what? Hours? Comp? Predictability of your schedule?
In recent years it’s gotten worse at VP since the incoming associates have been so bad.
I do feel that. That was the case for me at first but then I just stopped stepping in and now just do endless turns and they just stay up until work is in good enough shape for me to review. Before I used to jump in after one round and finish it. But not doing anyone any favors if they never learn
I'm still trying to figure out the right balance here. Do you delegate even "low-level" edits? (i.e. small text / grammatical errors)
Our juniors are really struggling. Feels like I'm having to be the associate and VP. It's not sustainable.
What do they struggle with in particular?
is the learning curve from IB to PE hard? wondering if its more of an attitude thing or a skills chop thing. can you pick up PE skillset first year on the job? wondering what the struggle is
This is a longer story but have noticed gaps on both the hard and soft skills side. You used to take the ability to build models for granted with incoming associates, but in recent years it’s very hit or miss which is very frustrating. If nothing else as an associate, you should be relatively quick and reliable in excel and unfortunately that’s looking to be less and less the case, meaning the VP/Principal has to play down to make sure it gets done right while also attempting to keep things off the MD/Principal’s plate which creates a lot of pressure on both sides for the midlevels.
On the soft skills side it’s more about communication and attitude but those I think can be blamed on the pandemic and zoom/wfh culture. This really exacerbates the former problem re: technical skills because it makes it harder to equitably divvy up work and make course corrections early, creating last second jam jobs for the VP (who ends up doing everything him/herself because the associate can’t be trusted).
bump
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