Looking back…

Unbelievable that it’s only a bit more than 5 months ago, when I started my traineeship and entered this huge company..

At the very beginning I was fascinated by everything:
By the fanciest hotel I have ever been (at that time), where we had our entrance presentation and apéro for all new hires. Then also by the business atmosphere, by all the stuff we got, by the travelling, by the people... It’s quite a good strategy to send your assistants for a two weeks training abroad, where the activities are more similar to a students conference than to a business training… J

Well, then the hard work and the less fun part started, I was working for a global key client and travelling more than two hours everyday. The mandate was very complex and I had actually no clue what an audit is and what we are doing. So I was doing the typical trainee stuff, formatting excel files, taking stuff out of SAP, printing, copying, booking hotel rooms… being there for everybody who needed something. To be honest the work itself was not really interesting. What I liked was the fact that I was working together with a very nice international team and got see the real business world including a business trip to Germany for 2 days. Thanks to this engagement I got to see, what it means to have a job on a high management level and I have to admit that I don’t envy this people at all anymore. I hope I will always keep the attitude that there’s nothing more valuable than having time for your live, friends and family, independent whatever they pay you!

As I wondered how the normal auditor’s job in the Bernese office looks like I asked my boss if they could book me for some other clients. They did and so I started “kind of a new job” in the middle of January. “Kind of a new job” because I almost didn’t know anything about the steps of a “normal” audit and the methodology (in practice), when I came to other clients. I even had to learn some German audit terms, to use different IT tools and to listen to many “nice” comments about the American way of audit. ;-) Well, I hope I managed somehow to catch up with the other first year assistants and am now more or less able to audit smaller entities with not too complicated issues. At least I’m able to use my accounting knowledge from university and have some more challenging tasks.

Although there’s still one client and one week in the office left, my traineeship is going to an end…

On one hand I’m happy because I really miss my students live (I already missed 3 parties ;-() on the other hand I’ve just started to understand what we are doing and have the feeling that the work would become more interesting when I stayed longer…

We’ll see, I know that I whether want neither to become a workaholic nor to have a 9 to 5 job where you stay in the same office day to day. I guess there must be a way in between and if some leaders continue not to accept the importance of their employees’ private live, they don’t need to wonder why the good managers leave the company…