It's been 3 days since I seconded to the fin audit dept, and I'm feeling mixed abt it.
On the plus side is the biggest indicator that my managers were right in saying that it would be good for my development to second: the work that fin audit does is pretty different from what I do in IT audit. It's unexplainable but I think I've been working with processes so much that I subconsciously pushed it to the back of my mind. 'It' being the fact that a big part of audit is footing (calculating totals), variance analysis (determining if the changes in totals are reasonable), reconciliations (whether debits and credits balance out to zero), calculation of accruals (whether the correct amount is recognized in the right period) and evaluating the nature of financial statement line items (whether they are classified correctly).....among other accounting fun stuff.
The cause for concern to me is two-fold: firstly, I've never done Advanced Accting nor Auditing courses when I was in uni, and to compound that, uni was 2 years ago, so I'm taking some time to even recall the regular accounting stuff. Contrast that to the two other 'juniors' on the job who are both studying for the UFE and thus are immersed in the subject matter -- and I feel a little inadequate.
On top of that, the client I've been assigned to is a non-financial services one. I've been told that I'm lucky to be assigned to one of the more organized engagements, but still, its a smaller company than most financial services ones. Young P used to say to others that he likes financial services cos there's more flexibility in the budget just cos the job is bigger. Now I see what he means. The team has a strict budget and the partner had expressedly said that no changes were to be made in timeline. While back in my own dept, I've always been sheltered by having the managers 'cover' for me when dealing with budget issues (mostly justified, since quality is the tone and sometimes more work is required to gain comfort), I'm out in uncharted waters here in fin audit. I don't think they discount quality at all, rather, I don't know how they deal with deviations from the norm nor what the standards are.
Last Fri when submitting our timesheets, the senior told one of the intermediates to make sure to charge time to my section as he provided coaching to me. The manager was onsite too and while she is nice, she kinda (half-jokingly?) said that it was all my fault that she didn't have anything to review. This is kind of true, because I was still trying to get my bearings and understand what was done in the previous year (thank goodness it was ONLY two years since I left school and accounting!!!), and the client....welll...the primarily client contact anyway (the Controller), does not seem to like me in comparison with the rest of the team. Is it because I seem so clueless (the truth being that I was never part of the UFE process hence not having the background to draw from -- but he doesn't know that of course...probably he's considering me a UFE failure in the making) or am I just too timid i.e. I should just assert myself to emphasize that I'm the auditor, and he the auditee....
As the outsider, I also have this fear that I'm creating a bad impression of my own dept. It's one thing to be part of fin audit and have the issues I mentioned above, but another to be from outside the dept -- the former is easily forgiven as "she's one of us", while the latter (in the worst case scenario) will be labeled the burden and resented for having to be coached so much. The team is ok in that one senior is reassuring (perhaps cos she can see my subtle distress?); the intermediate and one of the juniors are constantly helpful but who knows what the others think.
At the onset, they gave me a section to do but are they regretting it now? I think I'm new and unjaded enough to want to continue my secondment (perhaps to a diff client?) even after it ends early March (my original 2 months had been shortened to 3 weeks due to lack of needs), but after this, would I be viewed as a liability not worth taking on? AD had mentioned that when she was on secondment, she was assigned to photocopy and basically do gopher stuff. I consider myself lucky: but will it continue? The manager reassured me that I'll definitely learn something useful from this secondment, but I was assigned data entry last night. To be honest, they were apologetic about it, I've seen another junior do admin stuff too (stuffing envelopes and compiling paper files) and I myself don't mind, but is this an indication of things to come? I hope not.
Nothing like starting from the bottom again to to remind oneself how to be humble, and how to ask for help.
