Experienced hire

Transcript

I’ve been here twelve years now. I started in Audit as a trainee, then moved to Tax in a standard compliance role, but since then have worked in some quite new areas; I’ve worked in tax investigations, helping clients with big fraud investigations; and then for the last six years I’ve been setting up tax internal audit and tax-risk and systems reviews, both in Australia and in the UK- so relatively new areas of business, which has always been a challenge and very exciting.

The variety is one of the advantages of such a big firm; that if you ever did feel you were getting bored or you weren’t being challenged any more, there is always a new group or a new role or something different you can try; so I’ve had sort of five or six different jobs within those 12 years without ever leaving Ernst & Young.

I’d been a manager for a year, and initially I’d just actually wanted to have a bit of a break and go travelling. So I’d never... I’d gone directly from school to university and then come to Ernst & Young, and I said to my boss, I’d just like two months off to go travelling, and he suggested if I was going, why not go to spend two or three weeks in the Sydney and Melbourne offices while I was there, because they were trying this new area of business. And when I was there it became clear they needed somebody to do the job in Sydney, so I jumped at the chance and moved over there. I loved it, yes! At that stage in my life, I was completely free to move around and do what I wanted, so it was partly the excitement of living in a new area of the world. Some of my friends from England happened to have moved there at the same time, and I had three years which was great fun, but also while I was there I got promoted from manager to senior manager, and promoted to Director as I came back, so really, really positive for my career as well.

I think I see myself as having a very small area of business and being out with clients developing this new area; but being supported by a massive global organisation where, if I need to do a review in a specific technical area that I don’t know about, there is always somebody else who knows about that area and can work with me. Similarly, there is a huge organisation of people who do internal audits, so I can work with them to develop tax into what they are already doing. So although I have a small entrepreneurial business, effectively, there is a big global organisation around me.