Flying start 2 Accountant Review

I was a trainee accountant so my job was to ensure a companies FS are correct to the best of our knowledge. During my placement I performed tests on sections of the financial statements to ensure figures were correct and gathered evidence to support these figures. We also had to recalculate to ensure their estimations were accurate

I have developed Excel skills during this placement such as learning and using formulas such as VLOOKUP's and creating pivot tables. I developed communication and organisational skills when organising calls with the client and asking them for information and explanations of how they have came to certain decisions and the reasoning behind them.

I really enjoyed my placement this year, we worked from home so only could communicate with our teams and clients via online, which I believe PwC created the perfect environment for as we used programmes such as google teams to communicate within teams and for all coaching, queries and communications.

The programme is well structured with 2 training weeks to understand how to use our laptops and an internal website called Aura. These are followed with 2 admin days to explain everything we need to know about work such as charging time and claiming expenses as well as meeting all our peers.

I received a lot of support at PwC. We has a career coach which we could go to with any issues or questions and they were more than happy to help. Within the audit team we received support from all senior members as they always made sure to ensure we understood the tasks we were performing and why we performed these tasks.

PwC provided ICAEW detailed workbooks and question banks for us to complete for our ICAEW qualifications which we complete at uni. PwC had colleagues who came into our uni lectures to explain what it would be like on placement and what we could expect to do do during this time.

I believe the modules we studied at Newcastle university gave us background knowledge for the work we performed on placement. This helped me perform better as I understood the basics to an audit and what kind of information we needed to collect from the client and why we needed this information

Yes PwC normally host lots of events after work during non-COVID times however there were still socials we could attend online. During my experience my team finished an audit so we had a social expensed by PwC, during this we had make your own cocktails which helped us feel rewarded for the work we had been doing

Yes

I would recommend PwC to a friend for their great support network, and I believe it is a great company to work to learn new things and developing work skills as everyone is so friendly and eager to give advice. I believe the work hours can be tough but it is very rewarding.

I would explain to whoever wanted to join that the working hours can be tough especially during busy season so to speak to a chartered accountant first to understand if this is something you would be comfortable with. I would also suggest them to get stuck into all social events to get to know people in the office and develop your network