Smart Future Programme Review

The first 2 weeks was spent on learning about professional services and what they do on a day to day basis. We worked in teams to complete any tasks given to us. The third week was spent in a specific industry, I had spent my time in the Indirect Tax team.

Before starting the programme one of my big weaknesses was presenting, in large or small groups. This weakness was developed during this programme as I learnt that with the more practice I overcome this weakness and turned it to a skill. With the projects we also worked on I further developed on my team leading and team working skills as well.

This programme was very educational as well as networking and meeting people who are in the same age bracket but studying different subjects as well as having different aspirations and dreams to me as well. This programme also gave me a base understanding on the importance of networking and the results of effective networking

I had applied for the school leaver programme for EY however didn’t succeed at the final interview. I understood that there may be reasons as to why this is but having emailed them for feedback and receiving no reply on what I could’ve done to improve on myself wasn’t useful to say the least

The programme was structured and executed perfectly. Every day was filled with different activities as well as working with different people

The support which I received from the supervisor of the program was beneficial in terms of helping with gaining the qualification and assisting in anything I may have needed to do to improve on any of the work I had done. The resulting outcome of this was gaining the qualification which I can put on my CV.

The support I receive from EY is helpful in terms of being assigned a mentor who can assist in any situation, should you need it. This shows how EY likes to stay in contact with you after completing the programme.

The salary was definitely a massive benefit to the programme, being a student myself having an income alongside with a work experience is hard to come by especially with one of the big four firms. The only costs was travel expenses which were very minimal so the salary definitely outweighed costs

As stated previously, during the last day of the programme they had promoted the school leaver programme in which I was intrigued by. In addition to this, we were assigned a mentor who works within EY, who we can maintain contact with should we need any professional advice. This proved to be helpful to me for my final interview as I had to research how technology affects a particular industry; my mentor provided me with sources I could use to research for my presentation.

Yes

I would recommend this to a friend as not only do you gain an invaluable experience and meeting new people, but you get to gain a qualification (equivalent of a GCSE) which is a CMI Team Leading Qualification Level 2. This programme can also be beneficial as you can put it on your CV and include your experiences to be more employable.

My advice to someone applying to the Smart Futures Programme would be that the application process is simple with the initial CV and reasons why you want to join, but the key is to be yourself and be confident with yourself as well; they want to hire the real you, not a created version of yourself!