Trainee Tax Advisor Review

My work involves a lot of contact with clients, providing tax technical advisory work, and helping clients carry out and meet any tax regime reporting obligations that arise for them. Day-to-day I will work for short periods of time on multiple projects, it is very unusual to spend a whole day on one project/client.

Tax technical knowledge is something I had none of before starting my apprenticeship, and now over 18 months in I can say I know a small amount! The apprenticeship also includes training with Kaplan towards the ACA qualification with ICAEW, so I also learn a lot more generally on accounting/finance from this.

I greatly enjoy working with my team, and find the material we work with mostly interesting in itself. Besides the work itself, there is the inevitable large workload and often overrunning hours partly due to the work culture in finance, and partially due to COVID19 dragging the working day out, which I hope will ease when things open up to a better work life balance again.

I think internally in the team everyone does a good job of trying to ensure we get the training we need on the areas relevant to our work with our own training sessions. For the qualification, I think I dislike the apprenticeship approach towards studying that is several weeks of college split out over 2-3 months, rather than one block of studying as grads usually do.

The support system here is pretty good, you have an internal counsellor assigned to you who guides you through internal reviews and helps with any issues that you encounter while working, and can follow through with those to higher channels if necessary. We have just undergone a restructuring of this however, so I will need to see if the new variation is as good as the old one.

I think Kaplan overall do a good job, before the pandemic they also had a working hours chat support where you could talk to a tutor directly quickly about a problem, but this was closed probably due to overwhelming requests during COVID19. However, they still do have the option to email/call. Otherwise, their online resources and training materials are good quality and do help a lot with breaking down the material.

Mostly what I learn in my qualification is not directly related to my work, however the more general parts of the qualification certainly explain a lot more why we do things a certain way and why it's required to follow our internal processes. The qualification also gives me a much better view on accounting as a whole rather than just my team specific activities.

Yes, before COVID19 there were a lot of these! There are Arts clubs, many sports teams/clubs, often internal networking events for Women, LGBTQ+, POC etc. that people are welcome to join. There are a lot of training opportunities as well such as lunch time training calls to cover new topics related to your main work area.

Yes

The work environment is overall very friendly and supportive. It can be difficult to manage a work-life balance sometimes, which has been exasperated by the pandemic, but people are also always understanding if you have any prior commitments meaning you cannot work longer some days. I overall enjoy working here with interesting projects and good team mates.

In my experience the application process (which has changed since I applied but I assisted in reviewing), beyond the initial aptitude tests, is mostly about how you come across as a person and whether you communicate easily with others. The work here is very collaboratively based, so being able to get along well with people is key!