JPMorgan’s wealth management CEO Mary Erdoes believes graduates should expect to work 72-hour weeks.
According to Erdoes, doing so would help new workers master their craft quicker. By working 12-hour days, graduates should expect to cut the process down from five years to under three.
“On Wall Street, it’s more like 12 hours a day, six days a week,” said Erdoes. “That cuts you down to about two-and-a-half years before you become mastered in something.”
This falls under the “10,000-hour rule” popularized by Malcolm Gladwell that claims this is the amount of time it takes to gain “base-level mastery” of a skill. However, this idea has been disputed.
Erdoes describes every day at the company as a “constant education” that begins with an 8 am meeting.
However, these intense work ethic expectations among the financial industry have been widely criticized. Last March, junior bankers at Goldman Sachs gave executives an internal pitch deck that claimed they were working in “inhumane conditions”.