Deloitte Vancouver Office Tour

Since I decided to become an accountant, I am always curious of how their work day look like and what's their working environment like. It was a great opportunity to answer all that questions of mine simply by joining a Deloitte Vancouver Office Tour!

This event is composed of three segments: presentation, office tour, and networking.

Presentation 

During the presentation, the parts that I like about Deloitte are

• going green & environmental friendly--we talk about saving the environment for our generations, but not everyone would care to carry out a plan to protect the environment. 
• donate money to charities--for instance, they have jeans day every Friday, and people who wear jeans donate $5 to charities. 
• sports team-- soccer, ice hockey; jogging & hiking events 
• end of season parties--work hard, play hard! Rewards after a busy season cannot be neglected! 

Pursuing CA:
Vancouver office UFE pass rate is 98%. The company provides:

• one on one mentor
• weekend study sessions
• financial support to pay all of your materials (textbook and CA fees)

Students have the full support from the company to pass UFE. 

Work life:
Client's office is often their office. They might be away for one month to discuss with their clients. They don't always work from 9 am to 5 pm. During busy season some times they have to work from 7am to 11pm, especially tax people. 

Services:
Assurance & advisory, tax, financial advisory, consulting.

Variety of Clients:
Mining, IT, banks, auto...

Co-op:
Students have to rotate audit, tax, financial advisory, and enterprise risk services.
Summer projects: IFRS Training, Toastmasters, Ultimate Tournament...
 

Office Tour

Some of the questions that answered during the tour: 

• The company holds training for employees to broaden their knowledge. Each employee needs to meet 100 hours of training. It's great for employees to continue learning and improving. 
• If you are not sure whether tax or audit best fits you, then start with audit, from there you might start to have a sense of which direction that you want to go.
• As an audit student, you have a coach who you can seek help from, ask questions, deal with stress, discuss your accounting interest, your future plan...etc

Networking

Rest of the time, they left us to mingle around the room and ask questions regarding the company. I met a girl who studied forensic accounting, which is a program that teaches you how to collect evidence that points to whoever committed the crime. Dennis, from BCIT, gave me an advice to have 2 people as your study group because it's a lot of work and you need someone else to discuss the accounting problems with. 

Networking is always interesting that you are able to meet people from different kind of backgrounds. Generally, the students who joined the same tour with me were from UBC, SFU, Capilano University, and BCIT. This group is composed of people with a variety of knowledge towards accounting. Some of them just graduated, and some already started working, and rest of us are still studying. 

As to most of us were interested in becoming an intern at Deloitte, we were told to grasp the opportunity to apply during September.