When Sanjna Pathania posted on TikTok about the demands of working in consulting, she found little sympathy.
“I get a call at 7pm from this partner,” the former employee at consultancy KPMG recounted in her 2022 video. “He says to me: ‘hey Sanjna, you didn’t send me the piece of work that I asked you for, can you send it to me tomorrow?’”
Rather than empathising, some commenters replied that she was naive for expecting weekends off and called her story “tame”.
Pathania, who now works as a mortgage broker, did not respond to a request for comment, but the response shows how money and professional opportunities have shaped the work expectations for people in high-end, white-collar work.
While data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows Australians work an average of 35 hours a week, a 2024 survey of 2500 professionals in the financial services sector found the average working week for sell-side firms, such as investment banks, extended up to 70 hours.
Anecdotally, management consultants, too, can eclipse 80 hours a week, especially when their company has a major transaction or project underway.
A KPMG spokeswoman pointed to the firm’s 2025 impact plan, which says it had “embedded sustainable work practices that support healthier ways of working” into company culture, but acknowledged it had more work to do.
Australia’s employment law states that a standard working week is 38 hours but that employers can ask their employees to work “reasonable additional hours”.
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