In November, Rutherford Cross ran its latest Planning Your Career Journey event to share career insight from three finance professionals. The event featured guest speakers: Rebecca Hulton of Deloitte, John Walker of Scottish Power, and Ross Sloan of Amazon.
All of our speakers are under 35 and have achieved success early in their careers, each making a move shortly after qualifying to broaden their experience.
Rebecca Hulton – Deloitte
Rebecca discussed how the variety of working with both SMEs and large corporates early in her career has allowed her to gain wide ranging exposure and helped her realise what she enjoys most. Rebecca also really benefitted from having a mentor who encouraged her to gain the ICAS qualification even though it meant her leaving his business as he knew it was the best way for her to achieve her long-term goals. Rebecca trained with Deloitte in audit before moving to a boutique restructuring firm, BRS, and has now returned to Deloitte as Transaction Services Manager.
Rebecca’s key career tips:
- Be opportunistic- be open to ideas and different projects as they come along
- Be true to yourself- understand what your career motivations are
- Use your network- it’s not always what you know, but sometimes who you know
- Values- ensure you work for an employer whose values align to your own
John Walker – ScottishPower
John undertook his traineeship at BDO, gaining the opportunity to work for a variety of different clients, having the chance to lead audits earlier than he may have done with a big 4 firm, and getting a secondment in Tax. Despite really enjoying the culture at BDO working in practice was not for him longer term. John’s career has flourished at ScottishPower, working in Group Accounting, gaining an aerial view across the company, project management experience, and securing a promotion to Group Accounting Manager
John’s key career tips:
- Define what success is for you- what gives you satisfaction not always money and title, can be working in a specific sector, flexibility, culture
- Surround yourself with good people- Work closely with experienced people or managers who can help you, use internal and external networks, make use of mentors
- More you put in, the more you get out- Be authentic, do things because they interest you not because that’s what you want others’ want. Push yourself to take opportunities to develop
Ross Sloan – Amazon
Ross trained at EY and benefitted from having a very positive working relationship with a Senior Manager who gave him the opportunity to work on some really interesting audit assignments. Having always wanted to gain more commercial experience he joined boutique firm, Craig Corporate, until he was approached by Amazon which he felt was too good an opportunity to turn down. Ross is now really thriving at Amazon as the culture of making decisions based on data fits his outlook.
Ross’ key career tips:
- Always present solutions not problems
- Consistent delivery will mean that people will trust you with projects
- Be aware of the gaps in your experience that you need to fill in order to get you to where you want to be
- Only talk if you are going to add value, don’t speak in meetings for the sake of it
- Find a niche area where you can be the “go to” person
- Work closely with ambitious people and they will give you the opportunity to gain experience on some of their projects
It was fantastic to bring together our panel of speakers to share their career journeys and experience with our audience. This will be the last Planning Your Career Journey event to be hosted by Jonathan Donnelly as into 2022 Harry Young will take over the mantle of delivering our newly qualified event programme.
For a confidential discussion on your career in finance or to find out more about Rutherford Cross’ events, contact [email protected] or [email protected].
