The Long Hours at Consulting Firms in Asia

In Asia, it is common for consultants to average 60 to 70 hours a week, as compared to 55 to 65 hours in North America. Weekend work is also more common in Asia than in North America or Europe. Because of this, your ability to manage the long hours of consulting and prevent burnout is critical.

The longer hours in consulting firms in Asia are driven by three reasons. One, global consulting firms tend to pay their consultants relatively more than other comparable business opportunities (with the exception of finance opportunities with investment banks, hedge funds etc.). Some global consulting firms will pay global wages, which means a consultant in an Asian office \\receives the same compensation as his or her counterparts in North America or Europe, which can be 50-150% higher than a business position of comparable seniority in another industry like manufacturing or technology.. This creates pressure for the consultant to put in more hours, as well as an expectation of longer hours from managers. And while junior consultants may dislike the long hours, they will find it very difficult to find a similarly high paying job in their country.

Second, many Asian clients still have the perception that consultants perform the role of a vendor rather than a strategic partner, and because of this, think they need to make the consultants work as hard as possible, even though the fees Asian clients pay are often lower than those paid by North American and European clients. For example, a project focusing on the evaluation of five business lines can suffer from "scope creep" when the client demands the evaluation of two additional complementary business lines. even though this expansion of the project will likely compromise the quality of the recommendations.. And because of the discounted fee the client is likely receiving (which is still perceived as very high by the locally-based clients), the consulting firm will tend not to commit additional people to the project. So the existing team will need to work significantly harder to meet the additional requirements. In some cases, firm partners may not push back on these types of client requests, particularly if a project is one of the firm's first with the client.

Third, due to the relatively more hierarchical nature of Asian societies, junior consultants in Asian offices are likely to be more concerned about resisting the high workload, even when given unreasonable work requests that will result in them working through the night.