KPMG is a well known global professional firm that provides Audit, Tax, Advisory and Enterprise services. KPMG as a global firm is part of the renewed Big 4 accounting firms. I am part of the Entreprise Audit division. I am mainly involved in the financial statement audit area of my division. In Entreprise, you would usually be out at a client for an average of 2 weeks to do fieldwork (i.e. planning, control testing or audit work). An audit team would normally have a partner, manager, in-charge and other team members. Typically on the first day out at the clients, the In-charge would normally send out a document/email that would have all the work allocation for the team. The work allocated would be the minimum workpapers that you would have to complete within the given timeframe As a grad, I am normally allocated work on cash, payroll,PPE and etc. If I am new to the section allocated, my in-charge would give me a brief overview of the workpaper. At the end of the day, I have never had a dull day in audit. There’s always something new to learn every day. Every day there is a new challenge that I would have maneuver my way around. There hasn’t been a day that has gone by where I have not learnt something new.
I was born in Melbourne, Australia but I grew up in Malaysia. Growing in Malaysia, academic excellence was the main aspect that my parents would push me on. But my mind was far away from achieving academic excellence, all I wanted to do was have fun. It only struck me when I was in my 2nd year of university, that the path that I was going down was not going to take me anywhere in life. That’s when my life took a whole new turn. I somehow had to find within myself the focus and drive to become a successful person.I was lucky enough to have the support of my parents,brother and close friends to help me shape myself into the person I am today. My application for the graduate position at KPMG was your usually typical application ( i.e. online application, test, video interview, face-to-face interview). It’s been 6 months since I started here at KPMG and its been a very interesting journey as of now and I am pretty sure that my journey is only going to get even more interesting day by day. My whole journey in life has helped shaped the person I am today and it has not been an easy one. My main belief in life is that, there’s always something you can learn from every experience you have. If you stop learning/developing, you kinda of stop living.
Yes definitely. As a young graduate coming into the division, I have no prior knowledge of auditing. Everything I know as of now has been learnt from being on jobs. If one is wiling to put in the time and effort, then nothing is impossible. From my 6 months here at KPMG, one of the most important skill that you could have is critical thinking. It’s a skill that would be developed throughout one’s career. The other characteristic that one should also have is passion and enthusiasm.
I love the fact that I get to meet and work so many new people. I get to work with clients in different industries as well as team members from different walks of life. The satisfaction of seeing your clients and partner’s appreciation of the work you have done is a moment that reminds me why I am in Audit. The moments where, the client comes up to you and says that this is the best audit team they had in a long time are moments where I feel that I am in the right place.
The limitations to the job is that there’s a very steep learning curve as a fresh grad out of university. University education can’t teach all the theoretical knowledge that you would need for on job. A lot of the learning is done through experience and on job. But saying that, there’s always assistance/help in KPMG for those looking for it. Besides what has been said, there’s no other real big limitation that can’t be overcome.