Assurance Associate Review

I work on audits of various clients. This involves a lot of variance in terms of the work I'm doing day-to-day and the teams that I am working with. Our audit procedures are in place to make sure that the clients who we are on follow the accounting standards that that say / we expect them to follow. This can involve a lot of testing of specific transactions so that we can see the whole trail from beginning to end to ensure that they are representing a true and fair image of the business.

If I were to make a list of how many skills that I have learnt whilst on my apprenticeship we would still be here until next year. There is never a day in which I'm not learning something new. The one that stands out is having the confidence in your own ability and talk to clients om behalf of EY. This takes time as you need to learn the ins and outs and what specifically we are looking for, but it starts to come together.

I enjoy my programme. There is a lot of demand on you from day one which anyone should expect when going into their first big job. Sometimes it can be quite mentally draining on you as it isn't terribly easy from the start in terms of work and hours, it requires a lot of intuition and help from others but people totally understand that as you are coming into a department which you have no experience of.

Extremely well structured. Our whole client booking and general timetable is held within an internal software. This shows a week by week breakdown of what you are doing and who you are booked to. It is extremely easy to know where you are up to and who you will be working with.

An awful a lot. Like I said earlier, personnel understand that you will not know a lot coming in so they give you a lot of things which help in understanding the job but make sure you still feel like a valuable member of the team. I have never been scared to ask a question as most of the time it is better for the team to know where you are at in terms of your work.

We receive a lot of support. It is difficult to specifically pin point support as up to this point we have not taken any exams so revision hasn't fully kicked in yet. However, we get emails regularly from Kaplan to show we have mock exams and online lessons at the weekend or whenever we are unassigned.

We were given a week in college before being booked to any client and can guarantee this was done to aid us in our role. I already had done accounting at a level so I had a good foundation of knowledge. They provide us a good amount of knowledge to go off however we definitely learn more as we go on the job.

There are regular socials within every office at EY. Some larger organised ones which involve both of our North West offices in Manchester and Liverpool and some smaller which are made within teams or individual offices. Liverpool is quite a small office so everyone is quite tight in terms of friendship so there are plenty of opportunities to network with your colleagues. There are also sports teams as well.

Yes

If you have the opportunity to work at a Big 4 Accounting firm after coming out of college I don't think many would say no. You get the opportunity to work with massive clients which give you such an experience to kickstart your career as an accountant. Why EY specifically? The people. The job is extremely tough but without the support of the people and the team it would be much harder. They give you an extreme motivation to make yourself a better you and carry on improving every day.

Allow yourself to represent yourself and allow EY to see that. We want to know that you will be able to fit in and contribute as an individual to this firm. It isn't just about working for us, it's about making us better and seeing unique candidates is what we are looking for.