Our training
Mission: to learn something new everyday
You want to make the most out of your talents. And you want to develop a career that’s varied and worthwhile. Not to mention stimulating and rewarding, with structured training and a new challenge at every turn. Well, we’re on a mission to do exactly that and it’s why we’ve made a few challenges to our graduate programme.
While many organisations will help you gain professional qualifications, we’ve gone a step further to make sure you get not only the financial support you need, but also the time to do things properly. A step we think, sets our graduate programme apart. Your college fees will be paid and you’ll get plenty of time off for going to lectures and studying for your exams. You'll start with us on a 43 month training contract. As such it’ll take you about three and a half years to complete your CIPFA qualification.
So how much will you learn? How much support will you be given? Will it be scary or easy? All valid questions. All ones we can answer. You’ll start studying for your CIPFA accountancy qualification as soon as you join and will be given support every step of the way with generous study leave (we give you more time than most, because we value your commitment and hard work above all), as well as financial help for travel and other study expenses. There are even bonuses for passing exams. This will prepare you and give you the technical grounding you need to be able to hit the ground running – in fact, you’ll have completed your first three exams before you’ve even joined your area teams and started working on any live projects. Proof of the importance we place on our training. You’ll also be allocated a buddy, who’s already been through the graduate programme, to give you support when you most need it – in the early days of your training.
From the beginning, we’ve designed a clear progression path, including lots of varied roles to apply for once you’ve qualified – you could even be a Principal Auditor in as little as four years. And with lots of training courses available in addition to your core CIPFA programme keeping you up to date with audit issues and first-class practice including presentation skills, business writing skills, interviewing skills and many more, you’ll never be short of ways to add more strings to your bow.
In your second and third years of training there will be the opportunity to apply for Internal Assignments – a chance to broaden your knowledge and experience through working in different areas of the business. This is your chance to get a sense of the bigger picture and could take you into HR, communications or our internal policy and practice technical department, to name a few.
Of course, you need a healthy network of peers to grow with, which is exactly what you’ll get – with a real mix of people in the same boat as you – of all ages and backgrounds, who you can talk to. We even give you the chance to take part in a trainee conference provided for and run by trainees themselves each year. All in all, we bring together a healthy mix of study, real work and interesting people, to give you the chance to fly.
