Team Manager Review

My role as a team manager means I get to support a team of 10 people in completing their work as well as dealing with complaints and leavers to offer a resolution to any concerns which they raise. I am also responsible for ensuring that any required training for the team is provided and that people understand this fully.

I have developed my communication skills with individuals and have also learned new skills such as completing appraisals, furthering my colleague management skills, I also now have experience with disciplinarys and understand probation periods and the options available when these begin to come to an end including experience around extensions, termination and passing probations

I do enjoy my ACCA lessons and learning new areas of work which I don't already cover in my role however I do find this overwhelming at times due to the frequency of the lessons and sometimes these being 4/5 days within the working week which often means I will fall behind on my work and then struggle to find the additional time I need in order to revise for my exams

The lessons are well organised by the individual teaching and have structure to them however I do find the personal tutors often leave things to the last minute, including reviews which I receive an email notifiying me we need to book one in but I am then told that it is urgent and has to be done that week which means I either have to cancel something prearranged or use my personal time to complete this. The lessons also I find I am late to be notified of, for example my next set of sessions I have been given 1 weeks notice before they start and 3 days notice before the expected booking cut off to sit within the particular exam sitting given

I find the support to be okay, it could be better however I appreciate a business needs to be run and that whilst I am studying other people are having to either pick up my work or that this will need to be picked up after my sessions however it does become very overwhelming as often my work is dealing with complaints

The support is okay, I'm not sure what could be done to improve it, I am aware I can reach out and ask for help however with one of the tutors teaching the lesson I had provided feedback to my manager that I was uncomfortable asking questions to them as they were often condescending when individuals raised questions in the lessons themselves in front of other students

The qualification does help with my understanding of some areas, a good example of this was for inheritance tax, I had no prior knowledge of this and whilst my knowledge is not complete on the area it did give me confidence in providing a small amount of advice to my clients when they approached this

We do not have any extra curricular activities to get involved in at the moment unfortunately, we did use to organise a few things before covid had hit however we have found that people are more reluctant to get involved in external activities due to the quickness in which this spreads

Yes

I have found Paragon to be helpful when needed, there are areas of improvement such as timeliness of notifying us of lesson plans and when exams should be booked for based on when we will be receiving tuition along with and improvement on the timeframe we are being given to have a review with our personal tutors

Make sure you are aware of what you are getting yourself in for with regards to frequency of lessons and exams as this was previously 3 months but is now intended to be every 6 months instead which is a big gap and misses two exam sitting opportunities which then increases the length of time it actually takes to complete the qualification