Audit Trainee Review

My day-to-day role is working with clients and auditing their financial statements. This involves testing the balances in various ways such as agreeing to third party documentation and recalculating their results. There is a lot of team work involved with the audit team for each client.

The main skills I have learnt have been team work and communication since the work on clients is always as a team of differing experience. It is important for me to ask questions and help others when I can too.

I enjoy the challenge of the work because it is satisfying when you get a project complete and you feel you have accomplished something.

The apprenticeship programme is well-structured and there are clear deadlines for each piece of work that we need to do - however sometimes the communication of the work needed is lacking.

I receive a lot of support via study days etc but also overall from other members of my team, I know that there are other people I can talk to who have been through the apprenticeship programme too.

My training provider is helpful when studying for exams as there are study days and revision sessions so I have always felt prepared for the exams. The technology of communications could definitely be improved though.

My qualification is really important to my role and has helped greatly. Through studying for my exams I have learnt a lot of technical aspects that I can then apply to clients, but the exams also involve some critical thinking and transferable skills which are also useful.

There are often socials and networking events, as well as other groups you can get involed in such as sports teams or religious groups.

Yes

If you want to go into accounting then I would recommend BDO. There is a good mix of sizes of clients and lots of opportunities to work with a wide range of different types of businesses. Also the people are great which makes the work more enjoyable.

Be yourself first of all, but really think about why you want the job and why you think you would be good at it in the long term. Of course there is a lot to learn at first so you need to imagine yourself later on.