Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - EP31: My job as a Big 4 external auditor.

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Corporate Survivor Podcast, where we talk about how to grow your career confidence, build your skills and value, increase your salary, and the many lessons we learn in the corporate world. For more career support, click on over to www.mayping.com. This is Mayping, your corporate leader turned career coach. I hope you enjoy, like and subscribe. In today's podcast, I talk about my corporate experience as an external auditor, which was the first real job I took with a very small audit firm back in Penang, Malaysia. So I was an external auditor for quite a number

Starting point is 00:00:47 of years. I think it was close to five years with two separate organizations. So one was the small company I talked about. The other one was with Ernst & Young Singapore in the financial services department. So if you guys are not in the finance line, just share a little bit with you. If you have taken an accountancy degree or something similar, a lot of times you will need to complete your practical experience. And in the most instances, people would join an audit firm just to make sure that they gain that experience and kind of get used to the whole fast-paced um busyness of it all so that was what i did um i definitely learned a lot in the almost past five years um as an external auditor so maybe i'll start sharing some of the challenges. So the first company I

Starting point is 00:01:45 joined was a really small one. And for me, it was particularly challenging because, not because it was a small company, but because a lot of my colleagues were from kind of different education background from myself. So for example, there were a slight bit of cultural differences because their dominant language was Chinese and my dominant, my main language is not Chinese. So when your colleagues are speaking in a language that is different from what you can comprehend and fully understand around you, it's not the most comfortable because, you know, a lot of times, especially as a fresh graduate or a junior, you will require guidance. So it got uncomfortable, sometimes a little bit awkward.

Starting point is 00:02:39 It almost feels like you are butting into someone else's conversation and asking them to pull back and help you. So getting along with colleague, I think that part was really quite complicated. Communication, for sure, challenging because if two people are from like completely different education background and they don't always speak the same language like in the you know depth and breadth that um exactly like you you know there's a lot of need to adapt to express yourself in a way that they can understand and really to listen deeply to understand what they're trying to say and make sure that you actually can capture it 100 percent um aside from that the uh because it was a fairly

Starting point is 00:03:23 small company a lot of things were very manual. Like, for example, we did the audit documentation. A lot of it was in kind of pen and paper. So there were a lot of files everywhere. Then organization after a while becomes an issue. files and like tons and tons of documents that came pretty much in boxes by the clients for you know receipts and like documents and contracts that i actually had to um check through so i felt like it um it's like drowning in paperwork almost and i think you know that was maybe the precursor that eventually drove me to explore minimalism because I felt, okay, this is chaos and

Starting point is 00:04:05 I need control of this. Yeah, I mean, I think those are really like some of the critical challenges that I face. The good thing about the small company is that there is a lot of avenue to try different things because it is not that compartmentalized so that means that you know you could I guess I could really see a client through from you know end to end and kind of get a better sense of like what happens throughout the the audit process as compared to a much bigger company where you'll be assigned just a specific portion and you'll take a long time to really see things end to end so I think there were some benefits to that. And aside from that, because of my strong, I guess, English language ability, I got the opportunity to join the partner, pretty much the partner is the boss at the audit firm,

Starting point is 00:04:57 to different client meetings, you know, talking about specific projects, where it involved the initial public offering for some of the up and rising companies in Malaysia at that time. So that was also quite exciting because I had the opportunity to get involved in such senior conversations. You know, for someone who is as junior as me, I thought that was really a definite eye-opening experience, allowing me to see how they actually handle clients and really think further and thinking from the client's junior as me, I thought that was really a definitely eye-opening experience, allowing me to see how they actually handle clients and really think further and thinking from the client's perspective. So those were really helpful things. After that, my second part of the external audit experience

Starting point is 00:05:36 was with a much bigger company, in fact, one of the largest global accounting firms, En Seng Yang. Nowadays, it's called EY, to sound cool. So I joined the financial services department, which was the department that audits banks, asset managers, fund managers, as well as insurance companies. So in there, you know, a lot of things were definitely way more structured. It's a global organization after all. Things were a lot more structured. There were clear learning training sessions which were really helpful. Some of the challenges I faced in this new company because I moved to Singapore was that number one, definitely rapport with colleagues because when you join a team sort

Starting point is 00:06:25 of halfway and you did not, you know, graduate with your entire batch, there is a need to really connect with other people to make sure that you, I won't say accepted into the group, but rather you can be seen as a, I guess, contributing team member and someone of value, you know, able to be productive, able to support. So those were, I think that was really the key one for me. And secondly, obviously to relearn the framework, the process, the systems of this new company, which is obviously way more complicated than a small company. Aside from that, getting organized was something that was way more important and time management as well because the clients at this point were banks, regulated entities, so there is a need to make sure that everything that we reported

Starting point is 00:07:19 were accurate. All the conversations were, I found, way more formal than the previous ones. So definitely learning experiences on both ends. So one of the biggest challenges as an external auditor is always about managing your client, making sure that you keep your clients happy because the clients ultimately pay you. And at the same time, really managing the workload because in the audit industry, you are pretty much allocated multiple audit engagements to manage so one kind of piles up after the other and not necessarily that you will be working for the exact same team manager or a partner so you could be managing maybe three or four engagements at one time and then you have like a bunch of people really

Starting point is 00:08:02 chasing after you for different different deliverables so managing you know your boss's expectation your team leads expectation seniors expectation become absolutely crucial because you're not really dealing with one person you can probably have up to like 10 people chasing after you um to to manage your work and aside from that what i truly learned was how important it really was to i found manage expectations and keep all the balls rolling at one time and yes you know multitasking is really not the best thing but there is a very important need to really segregate what's urgent versus important, how to actually prioritize which projects or which audits you need to actually do first so that you could meet not just the internal deadline to your team members,

Starting point is 00:08:54 but also the external deadline that you may have promised your clients and even more important external deadline, which was whatever that was committed to a regulator. So all those become, you know, a lot, it becomes like a bit of a boundary that is beyond your control. So what you can do and what I did was just to make sure that I'm pretty much on top of everything. And yes, you know, one of the, I guess the nasty things you may hear about working as an external auditor is long hours. And yes, that definitely happened as well. But I think what's more critical is to remember what you need to focus on. Because you can be spending many hours doing a lot of work. But if you don't deliver something that is actually needed, then it's all pointless.

Starting point is 00:09:44 Because you can have a perfect report you can do like deep dive work super super detailed reviews but if it's not delivered on time then like what's the point right so really managing time expectation actually getting along with your team members these are so so critical to make sure that all these pieces come together to be able to allow you to deliver that audit report, that financial statements to the clients within the deadline and making sure that you keep your reputation intact, as well as also keeping, you know, your boss's reputation intact, because isn't it what that's all about. But all in all, you know, I found external audit an amazing experience to really learn how to adapt and work in a fast-paced environment, a very dynamic environment, which will definitely build you a good foundation, especially if you are an ambitious young leader, you want to ultimately lead teams, you want to work with very senior people, you want to work with very senior people you want to work with top clients or you kind of see yourself in a kind of a managing it all like a massive project lead

Starting point is 00:10:54 so these are little may seem little skills when you're a junior but I would say it's it is really invaluable to pick up because these these may seem little things now but it's really helped my career grow along the way and i think i was really glad to have the foundation as an external auditor to really make the future happen if you will yeah so i mainly work with like i said ambitious young leaders who want to thrive in their corporate career, because you know what? I have been there, done that. I have experienced most of the things that you may have experienced, maybe at a more intense level. So this is really the group that I really, really resonate with. I feel like I can help. And if you feel you feel even yeah i mean if you're a young leader you feel a little bit stuck in the corporate your corporate job right now but you you see so much

Starting point is 00:11:50 for yourself you think that you can do way better you have untapped skills you know what let's let's have a chat reach out to me on my social media platforms on linkedin and so forth and yeah i mean let's chat so looking forward to speaking see ya

Corporate Survivor with Mei Phing : Career Growth In The Corporate World - EP31: My job as a Big 4 external auditor.

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.