John, Careers change: Transcript

What were you doing before you joined PwC?

Well I work in the Strategy group in transaction services. I joined in October 2007 and before that I was a junior doctor in the National Health Service so I had gone to university for 6 years. I graduated in 2005 and spent two years working as a junior doctor across a range of different specialities before I decided to make the career change and move across to Strategy group.

Why did you change careers?

I must admit I have always been interested in finances and economics in that area… and when I was choosing my university career it was literally between am I going to do economics or am I going to do medicine. I chose medicine but in the back of my mind I always followed the stock market or financial pages so I always had that in the back of my mind as something I was interested in. And then I was looking for another career where I could possibly transfer some of the skills, the softer skills across to my new career, so when I was looking out the sort if attributes you need to be a consultant in terms of hard work, communication, working as a team, problem solving, the ability to work under pressure. All those kind of things where I could sort of identify with as something that I developed in my medical career as I could possibly take into a new career and Consulting seems to fit on those levels.

Why did you apply to PwC?

When I finally decided to make the career change I firstly went my old university website had a look at the career section, read up about all the various career options open to me for someone with my background and then also looked at the various companies that I could possibly work for and I identified PwC among some of the others as of the companies that looked like it was suitable for me. I then asked a friend of mine in PwC, although not in my specific group - I asked her what she thought about working for the company, what she liked, what she disliked and any advice she had for me. And then I guess I did more research more widely in the general press; I had seen that PwC had come top in the list of the Times 100 Graduate employers which was obviously a major selling point and from there I just applied to a few other companies.

What transferable skills help when changing careers?

You need to enjoy challenging work; really using your brain to try and work things out - and being quite logical about things and you also need to on the other side, be quite creative about certain things as well and have a natural interest in the financial markets - how they work - even if it's on a macro level, not particuarly detailed knowledge, because you might not have that from your previous career but in terms of do you find articles of pieces of reporting in the press if it's about the economy or about a company. And if you feel like that and you like analysing things, you like working things out and like new challenges, then I think it's probably worth considering a career in professional financial services.

What do you enjoy about your new Career?

I enjoy problem-solving, the challenging aspect of it. I enjoy the fact that you sometimes work for really high profile clients on quite detailed and niche markets, which maybe there isn't much data out there - maybe not much research gone into it so you're the person who is collecting these various sources of data so when your boss or your director says to you what do you think of this market, you actually are fairly knowledgeable about that market. I enjoy having to present your work, how to structure arguments and I also really enjoy working with the rest of the team both within my group and the wider group. It is really friendly, everyone gets on really well; we're very sociable, we'll meet up for lunch everyday, we go to the pub on a Friday for a couple of drinks after work and it definately makes it a lot easier when sometimes you have to work quite hard towards a deadline and you knwo that everyone else that you are working with is going through the same thing, also when you are on a break you have someone you can really relax with during those periods

What advice would you give to anyone thinking changing careers?

I guess it's really do your research, go back look at your careers website, talk to people you know in professional services, even if they are not doing exactly what you want to do just to get their opinion on how they find the job; what they like about it, what they dislike about it. Try and get as much information obviously as you can from the websites, from the press and make sure you really think will be happier in a new career than in my previous one. I think the way I looked at it - you've got a working life of say 40 years, and you might have done a career for the first five or six of those, but are you going to be happy doing that career for the next 35 years, purely because that's the one you've started in and if you think "No I am going to be happier, possibly working in financial services/professional services"- then it's definitely worth making the career choice.