Accounting Apprentice Review

Although I am an accounting apprentice I do not complete accounting tasks everyday. I work within a team at the FCA that works towards the FCAs missions. In my team if any accounting work or work to do with numbers needs doing I will get involved and use my skills learnt from my studies but my day to day tasks are not accounting. As an apprentice I get given my own tasks and repsonsabilities that contribute towards what my team works on.

Within the apprenticeship you have to balance working and studying which is something that I simply continued with after leaving school so I have developed my organisational skills and flexibility. Working in a well established company means that I have learnt how to act professionally and also meet and interact with new people.

I have really enjoyed working at the FCA. Everyone in the company is really keen to offer their help with training and all the new systems. Within my team everyone is also very understanding that I have to take one day out of my week to study and therefore I can't take on the work load of someone works a full 5 days a week.

The accounting apprenticeship is newer in the FCA so to begin with not everything was clear and some things took a lot of chasing to find out important information. BPP structure all the learning for the program and again to get that started was quite time consuming and took lots of chasing on my behalf. Now that the program has started it is structured well but to begin with not everything is made clear so would have been good to have more instructions from HR etc.

As I said to begin with getting my program set up I didn't receive much help or guidance about how to get everything going and now that the learning side of my apprenticeship is in full swing I am on top of what the next steps are. My employer is supportive in terms of giving me a full day of no interruptions to study and also to give me work that will help progress me and my skills.

BPP are very supportive and engage with me regularly to see how I'm getting on or to see if I need any help with the learning. I also have to complete weekly quizzes to track my progress. BPP are also very flexible with dates that you can book onto sessions and always provide extra support sessions as well as a chat box with the tutor.

My role is not directly accounting but within the team that I work in I am the person that deals with any accounting queries and numbers. Personally I like that I am not doing accounting everyday and it is applied learning and more problem solving. So I will be given numbers based tasks or problems and my knowledge and understanding of accounting will help me with the task but isn't exactly what I had been learning.

There are lots of extra curricular activities at the FCA. The FCA has a sports/social society in which they organise theatre trips, sports activities or suggest new recipes to try. The FCA has an onsite gym that lots of employees use and most teams organise regular social activities after work.

Yes

As a young person entering the work place the FCA are hugely supportive of everyone as an individual and supporting everyone's different needs. They really help you develop your skills by organising lots of training opportunities and push everyone to challenge themselves. They are also supportive of my study and really push that as a priority rather than forcing a bigger un-maintainable work load on me.

Research the company and understand the team that you will be entering. Understand why you want to work for the FCA and the role that the FCA has in the UK markets. There was a long wait from when I submitted my application to the assessment centre so don't panic and use the time to do something useful that you could talk about in the interview.