Achieving Potential – Ernst & Young Experience

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Transcript

Well, I have two sons and my youngest son was starting school full time, so I was beginning to find myself with a lot of time on my hands. I also had the feeling that I had certain capabilities and talents that I wasn’t making the most of, and beginning to get a bit bored, and about the same time we were going to various functions. My husband also works in the City, and people were talking about this thing called Sarbanes-Oxley, and controls, and having the auditors in, and I thought, that sounds just like what I do. So the three things came together, really, and I just felt it was the natural time to start writing a letter and approaching people I still knew at Ernst & Young and to see whether there was a place to come back.

I left as a senior manager, and I returned as a senior manager; so I had been a senior manager for about three years when I left, and I came back into that role, and working at that level from day one. I returned to firm nearly four years ago, and about 15 months later the part of the business I’m in decided to promote their first group of directors, and I was one of the first directors within that group – so that was 15 months after I came back from my career-break, I was promoted, which is one of my best achievements, I think, within my professional life.

Probably at times during the seven years I probably had gone a little bit off, if you like, but I think a big chunk of what we do here is around our technical knowledge, but another big chunk of sort of innate ability is about being able to form relationships with people, being able to manage things and organise things, being able to interpret information and apply it to the situation that you’re in; to do some creative thinking. And I think whatever situation you find yourself in, that if they are your strengths, you play to them; so during my career-break I ended up running the PTA at my son’s school, and that involved doing a number of team-building exercises, managing some quite complex projects. We turned the PTA into a charity, so I got down-and-dirty with the technical detail on that; so I think you play to your strengths wherever you happen to be, and I would certainly suggest that if you are on a career-break, you will have built on all sorts of things that you can bring back into the practice. I certainly have got a far broader range of friends now than I probably had before I left.

"15 months after I came back from my career break I was promoted, which is one of my best achievements in my professional life."

Transcript

You came back to work in 2005 after a long career-break. What was that like?

“In one way, it was great to be back – the mental stimulation, the team-work and the client contact were fabulous. But it was hard in some unexpected ways: people talked in very different ways and business patterns had changed in the seven years I was away. The tools we used had become much more sophisticated too – learning how to use my PC again was a challenge and being a technology specialist, I really hadn’t expected that!

“But I was doing the same job and many of the same people I’d worked with were still in the firm. What helped the most though was that my boss suggested I come back on a six-month contract. It wasn’t designed as a trial. He knew I could do it but he also knew that it really helps to have a concrete target to focus the mind. Once I’d finished the first six months, I’d gained enough confidence to go on. It’s a classic case of Ernst & Young going that extra mile – it was a small thing but it made a big difference.”