PwC Talent Academy Review

This was an incredible opportunity to gain a real insight into professional services at the same time as developing the skills that you need to be successful in a professional services career.

They are paying for you to stay in a fantastic hotel for 3 days with food included, I felt valued before I had even got there! If you are there then they are genuinely interested in developing you into the PwC professionals of the future. You get a particular sense of this when you are at the partners' dinner; they are all very keen to find out about you as well as answering any questions that you have.

We received an absolute abundance of insight. I was particularly helpful to ask professionals to describe their day-to-day job and to ask partners how they view the business. It was also very helpful to be given tasks very similar to those that you would be expected to do if you were working for PwC and be given feedback on them.

It certainly woke me up to the intensity of professional work, it was incredibly tiring but very much worth it! The skills that we developed: teamwork, communication, presentation skills are all invaluable for the world of work and I am grateful to PwC for improving these skills for free.

We got given a website to analyse and a rough idea of what activities we would be doing. We also got given a plan at the beginning of the three days and the times were stuck to very rigorously so we knew exactly what we were doing and when. They certainly got the most out of you by packing the days full of activities but it was entirely worth it.

There was a general positive vibe. Everyone was tired during the evenings but with free drinks tokens we weren't complaining! The other people were very friendly, there were far less wannabe apprentices than I expected, if any. It was also very diverse socially and ethnically and everybody got on well. I have connected with many of the people I met there via social media and it is great to be able to start networking this early!

There were a lot of people there who spent a fair deal of time giving us feedback and coaching us.

It was nice to be able to ask people who worked in sectors what they did in their professional capacity. However I feel that this area could be improved by having a session of half an hour or an hour dedicated to this as you can only learn so much from the website.

It was good to have a session on their core values and competencies and being able to put those into practice in your tasks.

This course made me thoroughly attracted by the prospect of working at PwC. However, if they had had the "what do we do?" session that I previously mentioned then it would have made my choice a lot easier.

Free accommodation at a 4* hotel, free food and drinks, travel expenses and free skills workshops mean that I think this was more than enough reimbursement!

There were plenty of networking opportunities; on the Monday we got to meet with recently graduated professionals for an informal chat about what advice they could give us and on the Tuesday we got to have dinner with the partners. Fantastic!

As mentioned above, very useful!

There was a teach first talk, which was interesting. Apart from that however, not a lot

Certainly. An entirely positive experience where you learn and can get fast-tracked onto an internship (and it's free!)