Life of a Senior

Well, no one said it was going to be easy, but it’s certainly a learning experience! Life as a new senior associate is tough, but as soon as you take a step back, you realize just how many new skills you acquire in this role, and how transferable they are as you move up the ladder at PwC, or transfer to another line of service, or even if you decide to move outside the firm into industry.

The learning curve is steep when you are a senior associate, as your responsibilities greatly increase. Not only are you responsible for your own work, but you are responsible to coach your team, keep your managers and partners abreast of the status of the audit, and manage the audit engagement itself. Typically engagements don’t end when they are scheduled to end, as things are always bound to come up.  So even after rolling onto a new client assignment (“job”), the senior is still required to follow up and complete the old job. Needless to say, we can sometimes have many things on our plates!

That is what is happening with me this week. I finished a job and started a new one, but we still have some loose ends to tie up with the old job. This is where the job becomes an exercise in time management and prioritizing, and although it may seem difficult at the time, going through such experiences really makes it much easier the next time you are faced with such a challenge. And these are skills that are not only learned and applied at work, they can be applied to one’s personal life as well.

So although I am technically working on two clients at once, both my managers know this, and keeping them in the loop helps because they can help to accommodate my requests, and know that if it’s taking me a while to complete something, there is a good reason for it.

I hope this blog has not scared anyone who may have been considering a career in professional accounting – that was not my intention! If anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask!