Finance and Commercial Academy Trainee Review

My role currently focuses primarily on cash management and forecasting, foreign currency deals, accounting month end and project work in one of our manufacturing plants. Generally, my day will be a mixture of project work, meetings and accounting work to help support the factory.

In terms of the Academy as a whole, you'll begin to learn skills from the first day of your first placement. These business skills will be built upon throughout your time on the Academy and each individual placement will help to you to learn skills ranging from dealing with customers, specific financial transactions, product knowledge to specific site cultures. Alongside all this, you'll obviously have your studies in CIMA to further enhance any financial and accounting skills learned within the office.

I thoroughly enjoy the programme. University wasn't something that appealed to me and the Academy gave me the opportunity to get into employment through a different route, whilst still building on academic qualifications.

If you're prepared to work hard, recognition will always come. You'll be given more advanced topics to work on, be able to get involved with a variety of different activities and even from day one, you're not being given remedial tasks to complete; it's target driven tasks that actually contribute to the business.

The programme is very structured with support offered throughout your time spent on the Academy, whether the support required is business related or personal. The Academy and Siemens as a whole don't just throw you in at the deep end, support is always there when needed.

BPP are a brilliant training provider. The tutors are always eager to help when you have an issue and BPP as a whole are always interested to see where they can improve their service. The notes, revision kits and online kits all are really useful and will help pass your exams.

As stated, both placement related and personal support is offered throughout your time on the Academy, but you are enetering the workplace and won't have you hand held at any point. You have to make decisions and try to begin building a career for yourself. Nobody can do that but the employee.

The salary and supporting package is a very competitive one that will meet all needs.

There are a variety of different opportunities outside of the workplace. By the end of a placement, you're working with friends as well as colleagues so events and activities will always come up. Just make the most of them!

Yes

It's a brilliant scheme in a brilliant company

Ensure that you're interested in working in the Engineering and Manufacturing sector along with interest in finance and commercial aspects of business otherwise the scheme wouldn't really be applicable. Also, try to find something that stands you out from every other applicant, whether that be through volunteer work to work experience. Being able to talk about that thing that makes you different from everyone else really does count.