Audit and Assurance Assistant Review

Your day starts at 9am and you will usually be working on one client per day, which you will work on in teams of around 2-5. Employees are given a 1 hour unpaid lunch break, and are usually allowed multiple tea/coffee breaks throughout the day before finishing at 5:30pm unless there are any sharp deadlines around the corner.
You will speak with clients over email, teams call and in person and will be required to complete these conversations in a professional manner.
To start with you are given a week or so of training with a mix of online and in person training events. Then you start working on clients immediately after. RSM is very proud of its 'grow your own' scheme so the majority of employees you will work with will still be in the training stages themselves, or have recently passed their ACA qualifications, this means they are very patient when it comes to the learning curve.
Per client you will receive feedback from managers, which will help you and the team identify where you need to learn more and where you are excelling in.

After 6 months with the firm they will have a new intake of grads, if managers feel you have learnt enough in that time they will ask you to support in training the new intake in the areas that you have recently learnt.
You are given a lot of responsibility during your year which really helps you to progress quickly. I have heard from returning placement students that you learn more in your year placement than you would in your first year as a grad student as there is no college breaks for the ACA qualification as a placement student but there is for grads.

Unless you have any previous audit work experience most of what you learn will be brand new information. I came from an accounting and finance university course and while I understood the basic concepts everything else was taught to me over the course of this year.
The skills I would say that I have learnt are as follows:
Excel - I have done many learn excel courses through school, but nothing has taught me as much as using it daily in and audit setting has done.
Audit - I came in with very minimal knowledge of what audit entails, to briefly summarise you will be looking through clients finances within the year trying to spot any errors in their work and then crafting or tailoring the accounts that will be published on companies house.
Confidence - speaking to those senior to me and speaking to clients.
Organisation - different managers will support you in different ways, some will 'hand hold' you telling you how long each task should take and what you should be doing next, where as others will give you a list of tasks to complete and a deadline and you will be required to balance the tasks and client interactions along the way. (You can still ask for help they will not leave it completely up to you).

The support I received from the team was incredible. There are options for hybrid working if you have things that come up meaning you can't make it to the office, and everyone there will try to do what ever they can to make you enjoy your time their as if they can get you to agree to come back it saves them going through the assessment centres to find a replacement for you.

With the company's 'grow your own' scheme a lot of employees are still quite young meaning there is almost a family feeling to the offices. I found when I first started that it felt a bit cliquey but once you have settled in more it is a very nice place to work.
There is a lot of pressure around deadlines, and assistant managers and managers will be working long hours to complete things around these times but as a beginner there is very little pressure on you to do the same.

I truly enjoyed my year out of University. The first few months were difficult to adjust to learning all the new concepts and getting used to a 9-5 Mon-Fri routine but once I got past that adjustment stage it has been great.
My only downside is the rewards and benefits, the pay while competitive for placements, is not as high as other accounting firms that I have seen, and their recognition for working overtime or working with difficult clients is minimal.

Yes