Assurance placement student Review

Despite the long hours, I have enjoyed working for PwC, there's usually a good team spirit when working on an audit.

This could really vary depending on what job/who you were working with. Often on audits you've worked on for a while there's a debrief to reward you for all your work. Other times, like any job, you can struggle to get on with everyone on your team (this was very rare though). On jobs where the hours were long managers did often make the effort to thank everyone, even if it was by just taking them out for lunch.

As you work with different people depending on what job you are currently working on, it's not like a usual working environment where you work for a long period directly for one manager. PwC assigns each employee with a people manager and you occasionally have catch ups. However, on each job coaching by more senior people is strongly encouraged so it's not an issue if you don't have a clue.

Often very, particularly during busy season (Jan-Mar). However, busy season didn't always end there, mine continued until at least May.

Quite a lot as you are often assigned areas to complete from start to finish, but there was always someone to help you if you didn't understand something.

I took 7 out 15 ACA exams during my placement. I also worked on the audits of a variety of different clients so I gained a lot of knowledge around how a number of different businesses work not just PwC.

You can quite often be at a client site rather than in the office, on nearly all of my jobs I've found the people on my team really easy to get along with.

We were treated exactly the same as the first year graduates so we followed mostly the same structure as they did.

Over the placement I received a lot of training, it was also continuous development whilst working on jobs as all clients are different and there's always an area I hadn't worked on before. PwC also paid for placement students to take the first 7 out of 15 accounting exams alongside the graduates.

Placement students are generally expected to be offered the job due to the amount of time and money PwC have invested in you.

We had a pretty big year group which got along really well. There were a couple of social events which social organised. The Annual Ball was really good in particular.

Reading is pretty expensive if you're planning on renting, however, we get paid higher than other offices to reflect this (except London)

Reading is a student town so there's loads of clubs/bars.