Audit Associate Review

Audit Associate 2nd year - Involved in day to day financial statement audits, working in teams of varying size, taking on large amounts of responsibility in managing my own workload and helping first year associates with their's

Developed my excel and computer based skills. Learned a wide range of auditing and accounting techniques.

I have been lucky recently that the job has enabled me to travel but this is rare. The hours and expectation can be hard to manage and are often quite draining, but again this depends on the types of job you end up working on

I feel valued by my colleagues and the people I work with. However, it is quite easy to feel fairly anonymous within such a large firm. The pay is poor considering the demand and expectation placed upon you.

Exam and learning structure is clear but communication of this could be better. Resourcing is under-resourced therefore can lead to poor organisation of jobs and client work

ICAEW provide regular updated and the tutors are allegedly always available to contact but this is not always the case

As long as you keep passing the exams, it is fine. Begin to fail one or two then they tend to leave you to sort things out for yourself.

Salary is poor given the extra hours beyond the contracted amount that we work. It just about covers living costs but considering owning a car is pretty much necessary for the job it should be higher. Expenses do help to cover some of this though and it would be hard to get by without.

There are semi-regular socials. I play football with some of the lads from my office but this is more organised within ourselves rather than as part of the company.

Yes

From what I have heard it is a more relaxed environment than its competitors. A lot of the downsides to the work are common across the Big 4 accounting firms.

Try use your initiative and be personable during your application stage rather than trying to learn how to do the perfect interview. A lot of the job is interacting with people so you have to demonstrate you can do this well.