I just applied online through the Deloitte website

 Laura: Our graduate and intern applications go live twice a year, but our main ones are in March – April so the universities usually market that and let people know when we go live and they can apply through our online job portal.

To be honest my family. My uncle and my poppa were accountants back in the day and still are and they kind of inspired me to do it. They had a pretty good career so I thought I’d give it a try. I went to university and I did a commerce degree and majoring in accounting.

Heaps of technical things and also a lot of soft skills such as speaking to people, writing, emailing and networking. Before starting I would say I was initially a confident person so those skills came naturally. I’ve definitely have grown better during my time here at Deloitte.

Every week I’d get stumped on things. Quite often in our compliance work it can get quite technical as there are certain rules about tax. For example sometimes we may have to learn about overseas taxes and understand their certain rules and regulations, so you have to be able to wrap your head around those things. Since we work in a team there’s always someone to ask and get help from which is really great.

Probably just the opportunity. I feel like each week or month you get so many different opportunities to progress and exposure to different scenarios, which is quite good. Recently I’ve been given a lot of client facing work. I enjoy the team environment here at Deloitte – it’s quite social.

I wish I did more research on the service lines and what they offer because I feel like so many people they don’t look into the career as much as they should.

Deloitte service lines include:

• Accounting
• Audit
• Tax
• Corporate governance
• Corporate finance
• Business
• Legal consulting

A lot of people go to university to do the degree and don’t really know what area they want to get into.

Definitely my team – the people. People are the biggest thing, we have about 120 people here at the Hamilton office. And just the exposure you get and the opportunities to learn are endless. If you were at a smaller company I feel like you wouldn’t get as much broad exposure.

Definitely overseas – I’ll be keen to do some overseas work at one point sometime. I want to get my CA which is a Chartered Accountancy hopefully at the end of the year next year. Just keep progressing keep upskilling and see where I go.

Deloitte is a professional services firm with more than 25,000 staff globally, we offer a wide range of support. We have 5 major business units audit, consulting, financial advisory, risk advisory and tax related services. We are the kind of people you come to if you’ve got any kind of question or query that you want to work through. Since we’re such a large firm and we work in so many different areas, that varies from like public sector, private sector, health sector… there’s literally someone at the firm that can answer any questions that you’ve got.

As a Chartered Accountant you can do anything – it’s easy to get a job. It’s a really valuable asset to any team at any business. I guess accounting specifically there’s always going to be a need for people to provide support and advisory specialty in the industry because people have a stereotype that AI is going to takeover accounting. But it’s busier than ever, the world just evolves and people are always want to go and chat to other people about their queries and about their business and numbers.

 Accounting is a career/industry that is always going to be needed and it’s always evolving so it’s a pretty exciting place to work. Within Deloitte there’s a whole lot of different avenues you can go down… you can go work as an auditor which is going into business and auditing them, working with them in a different way and you’ve got the advisory side of things which is working with small to medium businesses and giving them advice and then you’ve got our tax specialists. There’s a wide range of skill sets and transferrable skills that can move across different business units and you don’t have to be fixed into one career at Deloitte, you can chop and change!

• A background in accounting is definitely helpful but not essential
• Business core papers are great, like accounting and economics
• Business studies at high school is a good start.
• Doing courses in Excel and Xero – which is our accounting software – is also really helpful.

 Moving forward there’s going to be less of a requirement to have done your core papers through university, and more of a transition to supporting people to becoming accountants even if they haven’t studied at university. This will open opportunities up for on the job learning as interns, where they will help you with your core papers to get your accounting skills up and running.

 At school it’s good to put yourself out there. Join heaps of different sports teams and groups so you build your confidence as a person and strengthen relationship skills. In this type of work you’ll be working with clients and people and you need to be able to form relationships and be confident in those conversations. You can be really great technically but you need to be a well-rounded person to really thrive in a big firm like this.