I applied for various companies and most had an engineering bias. However, because of my e-commerce masters I thought I’d like to do something more business related. I always thought PwC was an accounting firm so I was surprised to discover that I could use my technical background here.
Helping businesses to become more effective
There is a very broad spectrum of work in Performance Improvement (PI). I work in IT Effectiveness where we focus on how our clients use technology to enable their businesses to be more effective. We help them with anything from advising on implementing a new IT system and selecting a supplier to undertaking a security analysis and penetration testing. Often they don’t know what they need or want, so we undertake a review, which includes running risk management work shops, to enable them to choose the best solution for them.
As I’m in my first year, my role is to assist on a project at any stage of the process. The client could be a new start-up needing advice on what system to choose or they could be an established company that needs advice on its IT strategy. Projects can last anything from 2 months to a year so we tend to work with a few clients at the same time. Although my background is technical, I’m not programming or implementing, I use my knowledge of IT to help advise clients to make the right choice.
Keeping in touch with colleagues overseas
The training has been excellent for my personal development and I get to choose my own career direction. When I joined I went to Kilkenny and Portugal for training. There I got to meet others from the PwC global network and make friends ; in fact I’m still in contact with people from Germany and Amsterdam on a weekly basis! Everyone is so friendly here and wants to help. Even the layout of our new building helps me get to know more people in the Dublin office.
I’ve done a number of jobs for clients within the Healthcare sector and that’s the area I hope to develop into in the future. My PwC career counsellor is really helpful and she steers me in the direction of appropriate training courses. We don’t study for a professional accountancy qualification in PI but we are encouraged to pursue both internal and external courses which are recognised outside of PwC and help new joiners to have credibility with the clients. I can see a very clear path in which I’d like my career to progress.
