Pros
With 4 weeks of vacation, you shouldn't find yourself feeling you don't have enough days off to request. Good work/life balance. You work hard while you're on the floor but take none of that work with you beyond your 8 hour workday. 5% 401k match with Traditional or Roth options. Chase also offers flexibility because they have so many locations, you can usually have a transfer opportunity if you were to move. Moving up the ladder is definitely attainable. The PCB role specifically exposes you to good sales methods and cross-functionality between partners (mortgages/refi, business, and investment advising). Although the sales incentive plan has been getting worse year-over-year for the past three years, they are starting 2016 with an "improved incentive plan" which just puts it closer to what it was three years ago. Bankers are given more responsibilities as other roles get cut or fade away (such as the assistant manager role).
Cons
Despite the pros, working for Chase is an overall con. I've worked here long enough, through multiple roles, to know the bigger picture. Chase, like many traditional brick & mortar retail businesses, are being threatened by technology. Chase's big goal for the past couple of years has been to push customers out of the branch and for those customers to become self-reliant, like most millennials, and use online, mobile and ATMs. These types of transactions are much cheaper than hiring tellers or paying a lease on branch building. So why would anyone come to the bank? For advice on investments, business, home loans and refinances. Chase isn't trying to fight the future but embrace it. In the near future, Chase probably only needs one responsible teller who takes on some assistant manager and lead teller duties. The rest can be done with advanced ATM's. Chase won't need Personal Bankers soon either. Personal Banker roles have diminished year-over-year not only in hiring but in sales incentive because their role is more transactional which is exactly what Chase is distancing themselves from. What is a Chase Private Client Banker? It's a banker who connects customers to the investment advisor primarily (also the mortgage banker and business banker) and assists the customer on the consumer side of banking (transactional side). You are basically a professional referring employee. You don't specifically sell investments, mortgages, refi's, or high-level business accounts. You "sell" customers your partners and sell them the idea that they need to get assistance from your partners. Partners do the heavy lifting. There in lies the problem with this role and the future of being in this role. Because fewer and fewer customer go to the bank and the bank does not want to be a transaction-based bank, the Private Client Banker role will be obsolete. It will most likely evolve into a call center type position. If customers don't come into the branch, you need to get them in the branch. The role already focuses on calls and getting good over the phone. A lot of bankers they hire, from what I've seen, have been between the ages of 21-35. Why would anyone in this age range begin a career in a dying/phasing out system? Unless you just want a little exposure to banking before becoming an advisor yourself, I can't imagine how this would be a good career move. A lot of Relationship Bankers and Private Client Bankers just want to make some decent money now but aren't thinking about later. Most of them don't have what it takes to become an advisor and that's really the only direction left to go after PCB.