Audit Vacation Student Review

I discovered through this placement that I do not enjoy audit. However, this was not the reason that I did not particularly enjoy the placement. Too often there was not much work for me to do, and at these times the placement tended to drag on. For limited periods, there was a lot of work for me to do and I felt like a contributing part of the team. Even though I did not particularly enjoy audit, I did enjoy working hard as part of a team on the project at hand and I believe the key to ensuring future interns enjoy their time at KPMG is to plan in advance to make sure that interns are sent to teams each week where there is actually a need for that intern and where their work will be both plentiful and useful to the team.

When I had work to do, I felt that my input was genuinely useful and colleagues appreciated the help I was able to give. I could see that the work I was doing was contributing to the overall project. However, too often there simply wasn't enough work to do and then I wasn't much use to the team.

My buddy was very useful in explaining what I had to do, and the managers of the W.R.Berkley audit team were all friendly and helpful in explaining my role. However, I never the person that was supposed to be in charge of my progress and felt a lot like after the first day there was a very limited amount of contact between the graduate team and me.

I had 6 weeks worth of work and spent only 2 of them being genuinely busy. For the other 4 weeks there was work to do, but often it was administrative and there were periods where there was literally nothing for me to do and I just had to get on with my own thing.

The level of responsibility I was given increased as the weeks went on and I was surprised to see that towards the end of the placement, I was working on parts of the audit by myself. I felt like I had been built up to this well, as they were things that I had originally helped others work on so understood them well.

I believe that experiencing a work place is always important and a useful skill as the environments we are in prior to working (university, school etc) are very different from the working environment. However, I do not believe that I picked up any new particular skills during the placement other than a slightly deeper understanding of excel.

The atmosphere was relaxed, even when the managers were present. People worked hard but made sure that they didn't get too stressed out. The managers treated everyone well, buying us coffee, taking us out to lunch and generally being friendly and talkative rather than acting like they didn't have time for the team.

I had very little idea what I was heading into prior to my placement taking place. Not much was explained to me on the first day and from then on, I pretty much had to figure things out for myself or ask my buddy (who too had very little idea what was going on most of the time).

My buddy and other members of the team were willing to take time out of their day to teach me, however I do not believe any of KPMG's online training was any help whatsoever and felt much more like a legal requirement than genuine skills development.

The organisation seems like one that takes care of its employees and I imagine that my poor experience in this instance is simply because too many interns were taken on and it became difficult to manage / difficult to ensure individual progress. If I were to be going into a job in finance, I would still consider KPMG as one of my top choices

Unfortunately, as we all worked across London in different offices and the only time we saw each other was on the first day, there wasn't much of a social scene between interns. As I live far away, it was difficult to enjoy much social time with my colleagues anyway.

Lunch and travel costs were very expensive. Luckily KPMG subsidised £4 for lunch, although this still meant spending £2-£3 of my own money at most lunch outlets. Travel for me, as someone that lives in zone 9, was exorbitantly expensive and I was very fortunate that the internship was paid or I would not have been able to afford to travel to work every day. Paying for drinks and food in Canary Wharf after work was expensive, as is to be expected.

Canary Wharf was fun on Fridays after work.

1 social and 1 social activity day