Assurance Business Placement Review

The placement was really good. You get treated like a first year graduate which is nice - they put you through college so you can study towards accountancy exams and really support you in the process. It can be quite long hours at times but overall i really enjoyed it

Everyone tries really hard to get you integrated into the team atmosphere. They have a number of social events that you can go to and working in smaller teams for different clients help you to get to know more people around the office and everyone is always happy to answer any questions, even if you are no longer working for them directly.

As they treat you like a first year graduate, they can forget that you are given work by your university to complete. Where they think you just have the professional exams, not any extra uni work, it can be a bit difficult to try and balance your time, especially in January to March when it's the busiest time.

For a lot of my placement (about 4/11 months) we were in college learning for exams, whilst the rest of the time was working on clients. When working on clients, as you are not very qualified, it can be difficult for extra work to be given if you manage to finish your taskplan so then you are waiting for other things to become available to do.

I was fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time to be able to do a lot of work on my own and get through a lot of the actual audit. Obviously there was someone checking what i was doing but being able to speak directly to the client and challenging them without having to ask permission was really great

As they helped you to study towards a professional qualification, this enables a really important skill to have been developed that can be transferred to any industry/ company that has a finance team. It also taught me to be challenging of the information presented and to analyse it critically before making a judgement.

There was a really good atmosphere within the office and on the placement as a lot of the time you were with people around your own age due to them only just graduating. This meant that there were plenty of people to speak to and get to know. However, on client site it was much more work focussed with less small talk going on as it would appear unprofessional

The work placement was really well organised as there is a specific team within the company who help to sort it out and arrange it. Within the year there is very little placement specific things, they just add you to the graduate things. There was the odd occasion where you would miss an email but overall it was very well organised

The firm invests a lot of time on developing your skills to enable you to be as good as you can be. Whether through training courses or college for the exams, you spend probably about 5 months in different training situations put of the 11 month placement. You are also always developing through the work as they build in time to be able to coach you through the activities.

The future employment prospects are really good after the placement. Generally, if you pass all the exams they put you through during your placement, you will be offered a job at the end of it. There's always some exceptions to this but you are likely to be offered a job at the end. If not, PwC always looks good on a CV.