We are all aware of the high levels of graduate unemployment and the rising costs of attending university.

It’s not all bad though!  An article in Personnel Today discusses how important undergraduate work experience is, both for students and employers. Maria Floud, senior graduate recruitment manager at accountancy firm Grant Thornton, states that the increase in university fees is making employers reflect on their schemes and realise how important it is to attract students from an earlier age.

“The internship model used as a key pipeline to the graduate programme is very successful. We recently won the ‘Best Placement and Internship’ award by Rate My Placement, due to the focus we put on ensuring this programme to find great talent earlier on.”

Congratulations to Grant Thornton and thanks for our mention – hopefully this will give employers and students the oomph and encouragement to undertake a placement or internship scheme  :)

If you’re a student there is still time to grab a placement or internship this summer so check out the opportunities on http://www.ratemyplacement.co.uk/search

We are also interested to hear your thoughts so drop us a line with your comments below.

Thanks,

The RateMyPlacement Team

• Name: Aly Jamal
• University: UCL
• Course: BA (Hons) Russian and German
• Placement / Internship Position/Job Title: Summer Intern – Corporate Tax

What was the application process like?

“The process consisted of four stages, testing a wide range of skills from numerical aptitude to business awareness. It was challenging but definitely gave me opportunity to provide evidence of when I have demonstrated the firm’s values. The interview also provided me with a great chance to ask questions about the firm and the role of an intern in that department.”

What did you do on a daily basis?

“The work I was doing was at the same level as a first year trainee with the firm. I worked on tax returns and computations, wrote e-mails to clients, liaised with HMRC and attended several client meeting. This was a great chance to learn how partners and senior managers communicate with current and prospective clients. The main highlight for me though was taking part in a corporate responsibility event. It was a fantastic opportunity to give something back to the local community.”

What did you learn on your placement / Internship?

“I learnt more about the firm’s service lines, its structure and its working culture. More specifically, having been involved in several tasks over the six weeks, I learnt the importance of prioritising tasks and meeting deadlines. Overall I feel that the internship has provided me with key skills that are vital for success in the financial world.”

Any top tips for a student interested in a placement / internship here?

“Get involved in as many things as possible! Six weeks goes really quickly. Take as much from your time in the office as possible, but also make the most of social activities. A night out with all the other interns at the Comedy Store was a particular highlight.”

To find out more about Grant Thornton and the internship opportunities, click on the button below:

Apply now!

Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughtout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers as they find a placement or keep us updated as to what they are doing on their placement. Click here to read all entries from our bloggers or click here to meet them.

I remember World Book Day quite clearly from school. I don’t, however, have any recollection of it during university, so I don’t expect you know that it occurred recently. This year was definitely my favourite World Book Day to date. I, and some other lucky Grant Thornton employees, spent it volunteering in a school in Camden. I was in a reception class for the day and had forgotten how small the children are when they start school.

I spent most of the morning helping the kids make their own books. This consisted mainly of me drawing animal outlines on request that they would colour in. The most requested outline was a bat, with spiders coming in a close second.

At midday, I rejoined the other GT volunteers and had some lunch with the teaching staff. There was a little bit of job envy on both sides… They get to play with kids all day, we… don’t have to deal with kids. That sort of banter.

In the afternoon, we were visited by a class room entertainer who was incredibly gifted. The kids were beautifully behaved, and joined in on his songs. After that, I got to read a story to the class, and then it was time for the kids to go home. A couple of them were asking if ‘Mr Webster’ was going to be coming back everyday. Very touching.

Everyone at Grant Thornton has the opportunity to spend one day per year as a volunteer as part of GT’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme. CSR will be a familiar concept to those who have spent time in a business school or big company. For those who haven’t, it is essentially the mechanism by which businesses give back to their local communities. At GT, it is difficult to go more than a couple of weeks without hearing about all the CSR activities staff are undertaking.

Needless to say, getting the opportunity to do things like this is great. I felt a huge sense of fulfilment and would definitely do it again. If you don’t think a school would be right for you, there are plenty of other activities that GT take part in.

Right, back to business…

Harry

Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughtout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers as they find a placement or keep us updated as to what they are doing on their placement. Click here to read all entries from our bloggers or click here to meet them.

So this is part two of my piece on stakeholders that you’ll interact with if you do a placement in R&R. This time I’ll write about debtors and the government.

In order to ensure the maximum return to your client’s creditors, you will need to recover as much of the outstanding money that they’re due as possible. Debtors are usually customers of the business, but they can be trading partners or companies to which your client has issued loans, depending on the nature of their business.

Recovering your client’s debts is often more complex than you might think. In a lot of cases, debtors will withhold payment, for a variety of reasons. It is then up to you to prove that they have a legal responsibility to pay. This can be done by looking at contracts and your client’s ledger. Once you have established that your client is due the money, you may become involved in instructing debt collection agents or lawyers to help recover the funds. Once the funds come in, you will have to account for them using IPS, the accounting package that is designed for insolvency practitioners.

The government plays a large role in insolvency proceedings. On your placement, you will be responsible for filing documents with companies house on behalf of your client and submitting tax returns. You may need to liaise with HMRC regarding your client’s tax liability too.

The Insolvency Service is the government’s main vehicle for liaising with insolvency practitioners. When you’re six months into a case, they require a report on the conduct of the directors prior to insolvency and their subsequent cooperation. You will also need to work closely with The Insolvency Service’s Redundancy Payments Office as they step in to tide employees over while you recover your client’s assets.

An insolvent business has broadly similar stakeholders to a trading one, but the relationships are different. It is managing these relationships that is key to making insolvency proceedings run smoothly. In most other areas of accountancy, your client is your work provider, ie. the main party that you need to satisfy. In R&R insolvency work, your clients are insolvent businesses, the work providers can be directors, lenders and their legal advisors, and you have a range of statutory responsibilities to perform. This makes it a more attractive line of work for a lot of people. If you think you might be one of these people, then apply now!

Until next time Harry

Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughtout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers as they find a placement or keep us updated as to what they are doing on their placement. Click here to read all entries from our bloggers or click here to meet them.

Last time I gave you an overview of the type of work you will be doing in R&R. This blog is part one of a two-part piece onsome of the different stakeholders you’re going encounter in R&R. Part one is on creditors and part two will be on debtors and the government. Most companies are financed at least partially by debt. This can be anything from bank loans to which their assets are collateral to employee expense claims. When a business becomes the subject of insolvency proceedings, this debt gets ranked in accordance with government legislation.

At the top of the pile you will find secured lenders. These are usually banks or syndicates of banks that have made asset backed loans to your client. In November 2009, I met executive directors of three leading banks to discuss a company that they had lent money to. Needless to say, I didn’t lead the discussions, but I challenge you to find another placement scheme that will enable you become involved with a similar crowd.

Next down we have preferential debt. This refers specifically to the claims of employees for elements of unpaid wages and untaken holiday. Employees can be the trickiest to deal with. Calculating and explaining their claims can take some practise, and they are often struggling to meet payments of their own. Preferential debt is unsecured, however ‘unsecured debt’ is often used to refer to all debt that is neither preferential or secured. Unsecured debt, therefore, is everything else. By that I mean supplier payments, shareholder loans, other employee expenses… the list goes on. On a mid-corporate case, there might be thousands of unsecured creditors. You will definitely be involved in dealing with these claims.

If you can talk about this sort of thing in your manager or partner interview then you will be in with a very good chance!

Until next time Harry

Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughtout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers as they find a placement or keep us updated as to what they are doing on their placement. Click here to read all entries from our bloggers or click here to meet them.

Everybody has gone to college. Well, not everybody but quite a number of the trainees are out at the moment studying for their ACA. After the first couple of months finding my way around the department, I have taken on a similar level of responsibility to the graduate trainees. This means that when they go to college, I often become responsible for their cases. This is quite good because it means I get a couple of weeks working on companies that I wouldn’t have come in to contact with otherwise.

I thought I should tell you a little about what you’re likely to get up to on a placement in R&R. You will almost certainly be working in corporate insolvency. This comes in a variety of flavours, all of which are available for you to experience. Most of my work has been in mid-corporate insolvency. This means working on a liquidation or administration of a ‘medium’ size company. For example, one of the cases that I’m working on is the administration of an AIM listed telecoms company that went under in August 2009.

You will be asked to perform a very wide variety of tasks. On the date that we are appointed (the partners are all insolvency practitioners) over a company, you might have the task of addressing the company’s workforce, or taking control of the company’s vehicles. Months later, you might find yourself reporting on the directors’ conduct or accounting for the sale of assets.

Some of the work I have been doing would be better described as large-complex insolvency. These are huge, sprawling cases that have a lot of people working on them! I have been working on the liquidation of an investment company based in Saudi Arabia, managed in Switzerland, registered in Virgin Islands, trading in London, with assets all over the world.

Harry

Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughtout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers as they find a placement or keep us updated as to what they are doing on their placement. Click here to read all entries from our bloggers or click here to meet them.

You join me as I enter the fifth month of my placement in the London office of Grant Thornton UK LLP’s (GT) Recovery and Reorganisation department. While it would have been advantageous to set off on the journey together, my late arrival to RateMyPlacement.co.uk may at least convince you that the spectacles I am wearing have lost their floral tint.

I shall use this first blog post to offer the most important points from my impression of the firm during my first week. Next time, I’ll give you a summary of my experience to date and by my third post, we should be completely caught up, and ready to go. After the HR and H&S inductions of my first morning, I arrived at 30 Finsbury Square, GT’s modern, spacious office in the City. GT has a buddy system in effect, and there to meet me was my very own buddy, Nick.

At the time, I thought that Nick was the guy to ask all of the thousands of questions that I would have about my work. I am certain his answers would have been accurate, and indeed the queries that I have taken to him have been satisfied every time. However, I quickly learned GT’s secret to the successful training of young accountants… Everyone is incredibly, incredibly helpful.

This isn’t a prescription from the upper echelons of management, it is an organic, cultural thing. I know this to be true as two months later, I was doing all I could to help the new graduates settle in and get started. The result is that today, I feel confident, established and capable of carrying out the requirements of my role. I’ll go into what I actually do next time.

When one starts life in a new organisation, whether it be a sports club, university, religious group or firm, the senses are overloaded as the brain attempts to suck in all of its surroundings’ available information. This initial period of gauging the relative importance and expertise of individuals, identifying good sources of organisational information and making connections with those around you was intense, but enjoyable, at GT. It also became much easier at around 6pm on my first Friday, when I joined a surprisingly large number of my colleagues at a nearby bar.

So before I return to work, if you hadn’t guessed it, the main thing I found in my first week in the office was not about accounting and maths, or business or finance, it was that there were people there. It sounds obvious, and if something sounds obvious it probably is. But this wasn’t to me, and I was pleasantly surprised when they turned out to be so nice.

Comments are welcomed. Until next time, Harry

Prefer to watch videos rather than read the profile page text? Have a look at the tongue-in-cheek video produced by Grant Thornton about their placement and graduate opportunities. Nice to see employers creating special videos aimed at students and putting a bit of humour in them too, it’s all to easy to go for a safe corporate video.

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For more information about Grant Thornton’s undergraduate opportunities click here.

Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughtout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers as they find a placement or keep us updated as to what they are doing on their placement. Click here to read all entries from our bloggers or click here to meet them.

I can’t believe that I’ve finished my internship already. Six weeks has gone so quickly – I must be getting old!

This last week has been a strange one… even though I was only here for a few weeks I found the idea of leaving all of the new people I’d met (staff and interns) pretty sad. However there was plenty to keep us busy as we tried to get things finished off – I managed to get my last tax return in the post at 4.30 on Friday afternoon!

This was also the week of our final round interviews – one with a manager and one with a partner. Although we were able to apply to any department, I decided to go for a role in Private Client Tax where I had been working – challenging work and a great team. The manager interview was essentially competency based again, whereas the partner interview felt more like a chat where I was asked more general questions about the firm such as why I wanted to apply there specifically and what had been the main challenges during my internship.

We’ll find out soon if we’ve been lucky enough to secure a place at GT but even without that added bonus I have had a fantastic 6 weeks full of new experiences, met some great people, earned some money and learnt skills that will benefit me wherever life takes me.

So, my one piece of advice to those of you in your penultimate year at uni would be to do an internship.

Thanks for reading my blog and I hope it’s been useful

Lucy

Find out what our Guest Bloggers are getting up to. Throughtout the year we will be following the progress of our Guest Bloggers as they find a placement or keep us updated as to what they are doing on their placement. Click here to read all entries from our bloggers or click here to meet them.

Finally after all the cake-baking and fund-raising the big moment arrived! Monday saw the London interns wandering around B&Q looking slightly confused as we tried to figure out exactly how much paint would be needed for our mural and just how much ground one bag of wood-chip would cover.

On Tuesday we were joined by some of the National Interns and we all headed to Edith Neville Primary School for our Corporate Responsibility Day. In the end, after an exhausting effort, the results were great – the garden area looked much more cheerful and the murals should do the job and brighten up the playground. From the emphasis placed on this activity during our internship, it’s clear that corporate responsibility is very important to Grant Thornton.

The week ended with another informative “Lunch and Learn”. The theme this week was Advisory and we were able to chat to representatives from Business Risk Services, Recovery and Reorganisation, and Actuarial Services. I really hadn’t realised how varied GT is! This was our final “Lunch and Learn” and next week it’s the big decision time – do we want to apply for a graduate role with the company?

Week 5 and we were off to Bradenham Manor (GT’s dedicated training centre in Buckinghamshire) for the dreaded “Presentation Skills” training! In the end though I think most of us decided that this was the highlight of the internship so far. Again, we were joined by the National Interns so there were 30 of us in this beautiful rural setting for our two-day course. I had been told in advance how great the food was and it certainly didn’t disappoint! The course itself, led by Tim and Ken from New Tricks Training, was fantastic. They made the course entertaining and there was a very relaxed atmosphere. By the end everyone felt their confidence with public speaking had increased and the presentation skills we picked up should be beneficial for next year at uni, as well as in our future careers.

It was hard settling back to work after our two-day break in the country! Had to be done though since our manager review meetings were approaching… and this was when our manager would tell us if they were supporting our application for a graduate role! Luckily mine went well, so this weekend will be full of interview preparation for next week… Wish me luck!