Philip Mortimer works in the valuations review group of a leading investment bank.
What advice would you give to newly qualified accountants looking for jobs?
Talk to people who you know are newly qualified accountants, those still in practice and those outside of practice. Get to know not just what their job is like now, but what they can and will be doing in two or three years time. Get your recruitment consultant to talk you what's available - there may well be some roles that you haven't even considered. To decide which sector you want to go into, think what your strengths are. Do you want to improve your people skills and move into a more managerial role? Do you want to take on some project-based work? Do you want to travel? Do you want to develop your technical skills? Once you've answered these questions you should be able to narrow down the options available to you.
Why did you make the career decisions you did once you became qualified?
I asked myself the questions above and decided I most wanted to develop my technical skills. I moved out of practice and into a financial control job at an investment bank for this reason.
What does your role entail?
Our group verifies prices of the bank's entire inventory to external data. This may seem straightforward, but for the kind of products the bank trades this is often far from simple. The team I work in deals with structured credit valuations and I compile data on external credit spreads and correlation levels for traded indices and bespoke baskets of credits.A lot of my time is spent understanding the structured deals the bank has entered into, to determine whether they are modelled correctly and how we can verify that they are correctly marked. Unfortunately this can involve a considerable amount of spreadsheet wizardry.
What do you enjoy most about your role?
I most enjoy the technical challenge involved in understanding the products and how they are valued. You gain considerably more exposure to this in an investment bank than you do as an external auditor, although the role is accordingly more narrow. I also enjoy working with a very smart bunch of people - there is a vast amount of experience amongst my colleagues and I am learning a lot from them.