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'Insights into working at KPMG' podcasts

11 May 2007

Presenter:

Hello and welcome to episode two of the second series of KPMG’s new range of podcasts. In this series, called Insights into Working at KPMG, we’ll be exploring the kinds of learning and development opportunities that different KPMG people have experienced. All KPMG people have access to different types of development initiatives that can help people reach their full potential. I’m going to be speaking to Vanessa Soames, Manager at KPMG in the UK, London and James Allt-Graham, partner at KPMG in Australia, Sydney about their experiences.

First of all, Vanessa, how long have you been with the organization and have you been promoted during your time at KPMG?

Vanessa::

I’ve been at KPMG just over two years and I was promoted from Assistant Manager to Manager level within a year and a half of being at KPMG.

Presenter:

What’s your view of the learning and development opportunities on offer at KPMG?

Vanessa:

The opportunities available at KPMG are fantastic. Within joining, you have already, your skills gap looked at within six weeks of joining, where you sit down with your manager and look at the areas you think you may have a gap for this new role that you’re in. You then go onto the My Learning web site and have a look to see what courses are available that you can do that might fill that skills gap and have a discussion with your manager on that. Those of the internal courses are available, which are hundreds of them. There’s also you look at the skills gap you might have with the market you’re working in and the external courses you might want to go on. So since I’ve been at KPMG, I’ve probably gone to four or five courses a year, probably two of them internal and three of them external.

Presenter:

What specific opportunities have been made available to you, for example leadership programs, management skills training, mentoring and coaching.

Vanessa:

Within about nine months of being at KPMG I was nominated to go on something called the Emerging Leaders Program and what this was is a program, first of all you did two days which was run by a company and it went through all the various management techniques and then you worked in a group with people from all sorts of the business who have been targeted as emerging leaders and put together proposals and strategies which you then present to partners within the business. So that was a fantastic opportunity to work on and really challenged me as an individual and my management techniques, and also just reaffirmed that I was doing some of the right things and we got to role play some of the scenarios so you could see how you would react to things. When I joined KPMG, I joined as an Assistant Manager and one of the areas that I hadn’t had a lot of experience in was managing big teams of people. I’d managed individuals, but I suddenly took over management of four people so my manager decided that perhaps that was one of my weaker areas, so I went on a coaching course, which was fantastic and really showed me how to coach people, especially as all the staff that I had were based in the region.

Presenter:

Thank you, Vanessa. I’m now going to be speaking to James Allt-Graham, who’s a partner at KPMG in Australia, Sydney, about his experiences.

James, first of all, what do you think of KPMG’s Learning and Development opportunities?

James:

Well, I’ve had a number of different roles with the Australian firm. I started in the audit practice where I actually completed the Professional Year Program, and I think the first six years that you’re with the firm there’s a pretty structured program throughout all of the divisions, whether it be tax where the Master of Tax programs there. Audit certainly the PY program, and I think those technical training courses are really helpful in terms of building your technical skills. In combination with that, the softer skills program, in terms of writing and presentation skills. So I certainly took the opportunity to get involved in all of those in those first six years or so. I then took on an MBA. I was very keen to become more involved in the advisory side of the firm and I felt that it was important to sort of broaden out beyond my sort of audit and accounting background, and so the firm actually assisted with my MBA. I found that a fantastic experience, learning a lot about other things like IT, a lot about change management and strategy, so that was a really beneficial part to get some of my technical development. There’s also been quite a focus on some of the non-technical skills. You know, there’s been a number of courses that I’ve attended now on sales skills and negotiating skills. In Australia, the firm’s also been fairly keen to make sure that we develop our strategic planning skills and I was just sent on a course only a couple of years ago, with the Macquarie Graduate School of Management with managers from all industries. There were about 30 of us who attended the course and it was really interesting to learn what others were doing and how we could all apply a more rigorous framework to our strategic planning. So I’ve had the opportunity to undertake quite a variety of activities and most recently I was asked to attend the Chairman’s 25 program, which is 25 partners from around the region attending. It’s a four week program, three weeks of those with the Insead University in Singapore and one week has been actually in China. I’m in Beijing at the minute, where we’ve had a really interesting couple of days, presentations from leadership and also visiting some of the key clients in the biggest growth market for the global network, being China. So I think the programs within learning and development are very broad. There’s quite a variety of them in terms of whether they’re technical training, whether they’re building some of your softer skills and they do continue on throughout your career. I think one of the things I’ve been very impressed about is that having achieved partner admission four years ago, that’s certainly not the end of your training. It continues on and the Chairman’s 25 has been a great example of that.

Presenter:

What’s the best advice that you would give to new people for developing their career when joining KPMG?

James:

I think the most important thing when you join KPMG is to really try to get an understanding of what are the opportunities that are out there. Web sites now have fantastic information on the courses that you can do at each point in your career. But it’s really, the important thing is really that each individual needs to have a look at those and understand them. The second thing I’d say is really understand what those courses are and pick out the ones that are of great interest to you and make sure that you build them into your dialogue process, so when you’re having your counseling and career discussion, make sure that you’re clear about the sorts of training that you need in order to achieve your career goal.

Presenter:

Thank you, James. Join us next month for the next podcast in this series.