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The new intake of trainee accountants who started in February 2016 have just completed the first few months of their audit training contract. My interactions with the new trainees in the last few months has made me decide it is important to look at the value of the audit training contract as they will spend the next 3 years trying to complete their contracts successfully.
“Why should I do audit articles if I do not want to be an audit partner?”
This is a question many trainees have in their mind. It is a reasonable question since your training contract should prepare you for your career ahead, so why should you spend it learning to do something that you are not planning to take any further?
Many trainees view articles as a long and painful item they need to tick off their To Do list before qualifying. This is unfortunate, since the value of the learning experience will be lost while ticking and bashing the days away.
Auditing gives you a backstage pass into any business, any industry, at any level. There are very few other jobs I can think of that give you access to the type of information that a trainee audit clerk has access to. In many cases, not even the clients’ employees have as much access to this financial information.
You may not want to be an audit partner, but you cannot ignore the value of gaining first-hand experience of the processes, policies and decisions that do and do not work for your clients. Those years give you the chance to understand the relationship between the financial and non-financial information, the controls and the decisions that are made at different levels in the company and how all of this affects the success of the business. Most importantly you get to do this from an objective position. By watching how different companies operate, you obtain great exposure to businesses which may one day influence the decisions you make, the controls you may want to implement or areas you may want to focus on based on the experience you have had of what works and what does not.
This is why I feel auditing is so valuable. It provides you with the theory of how information is processed in a business, the control concepts that should be considered, and then provides you with an opportunity to see this in practice in more than one entity.
So while you are performing the procedures during the audit, do not limit your learning experience to the effect on the audit. Look beyond the audit findings and find the beginnings of a wealth of knowledge and experience you will bring to any company you work for in the future or create for yourself.
I was fortunate enough to have my seniors impart this knowledge to me when I started my articles, which really opened my eyes to everything I could learn. I hope that by sharing the information above, it will fuel inspiration to those who have just started their contracts and give some perspective to those who already are in the middle of their training contracts.