Assistant Associate Review

I am a corporate tax advisor for financial service business'. I visit clients and work on project involving transactions, restructuring and various compliance and other advisory tasks. My roles include research, responding to client queries as well as manageing and running porjects.

I have learnt numerous tax technical skills, as well as developing presentation skills, personal interaction skills and learning how to deal with clients.

I thoroughly enjoy the programme, enjoying being part of a team and getting the same level of exposure as the graduates get.

Within my team I feel highly valued, being welcomed in as a member of the team and being treated the same as anyone else. Within Deloitte as a whole there is a slight feeling of abandonment and under-valued approach to the brightstarts, with the recruitment teams paying a significant amount more attention to the scholars than to the brightstarts. This feeling is felt across the scheme and many have tried to bring it up only to be either ignore or shut down.

We have been given our training schedule for this year, but bar that there is not much evidence for how we will continue to go on, and there is not much communication from the training team as to how we progress / if we can speed things up.

Kaplan provide what Deloitte pay them for, where Deloitte pay for college the support is great, and the learning is easy and clear. Where we have other forms of learning such as webinars it is a lot harder and the pressure is on a lot more.

Within the department there is a great deal of support and help. From the HR team there is very little support, and the feeling is that they only contact us when they need to - I.e. very little communication about course structures.

Our salary meets my costs for living at home, however there would be no chance in the world for me to live in London on my current salary. As well as this there is the feeling that we are in the office more and tend to work longer hours on my difficult work so are of more value to the team, yet are paid significantly less than the graduates, and in terms of progression held back.

There are a great deal of opportunities outside of work, including department and firm lead events. I have not been able to experience a great deal of these, but what I have experienced ahs been fantastic.

Yes

Within my department at Deloitte, it has been fantastic and everyone has been very supportive. Within the firm as a whole they do need to pay a bit more attention to brighstarts, and perhaps be clearer with us, but I do not regret joining and thoroughly know that, in the long term, I will be significantly better of than had I gone to uni.

Be honest on your application, take your time and make sure you are properly prepared for interviews. Make sure you are relaxed and confident and don't worry about the interviewers, they're not scary!