Tuesday, 24 August 2010

Finally I'm A Qualified Accountant!

As this Day Zero list was written in July 2010 I had already sat my final ACCA exams, and I was hoping that I had passed them all and ACCA qualification was only short way away making this a fairly easy one to tick off the list... Still I stuck it on the list as it does represent a huge achievement, and there was always a chance I'd fail one and have to re-take!

The thing is, I didn't even mean to be an accountant. I actually wanted to work in publishing or something as I love books! But after leaving school I didn't have much clue about getting myself a job and ended up applying for a purchase ledger assistant as the advert said "would suit school leaver" and dad threatened to withdraw my allowance if I didn't apply for that job!

The rest, as they say is history. I hated the first few months of purchase ledger. I couldn't add up a manual cashbook and I struggled to reconcile anything. I couldn't work out why my boss would like me for a few weeks at a time and then suddenly find all my errors at once until it occurred to me this tended to happen around month end when the accounts were prepared... Then one day it suddenly clicked and everything fell into place.

I didn't start studying until a couple of years later. I was doing a job in Blackpool which was half accounts and half HR both of which I enjoyed. Lots of the people my age in the office were apprentices, earning a pittance while allowed 2 days a week at college and I was quite in awe of their dedication to their careers. When I returned to Tunbridge Wells a few months later I decided to focus on accounting as it had a more clear cut career path, and I started studying AAT in the evenings. I chose AAT because I was fairly certain the proper exams would be too difficult for me.

Doing AAT was a slog. Two evenings a week at college was a big chunk of time to give up, and although I did later switch to mornings, I then had to work later in the evenings to make the hours up. However I finished the three years easily, doing little revision and only needing to do one retake, also making some friends for life along the way. I did have to re-take one exam, although that one was so poorly written they had to re-mark everyones. I still failed after the re-mark... but I choose to believe that was down to an odd paper!

I thought I'd go onto to ACCA and see how it went. My plan was basically to stop if it was too hard! But again, I found it wasn't too difficult, the teachers at BPP were brilliant and although I wasn't getting outstanding results, the passes kept piling up.

The last two papers of Level 2 were suddenly very difficult. The concepts were harder to wrap your head around and you were expected to memorise long formulas that in real life you'd look up on google. Level 3 continued as a struggle with my first failure on the Ethics paper (I have no idea how that happened!) and exam P2 required more memorising, this time of around 20 International Accounting Standards and its only due to the fact my brother will do anything for a free meal, including test me on incomprehensible ISAs that I passed that exam.

Yesterday I passed Ethics with one of my best marks so far, and now I'm qualified. Seven years after I started. (Not six as I posted on facebook, I may have miscounted ahem...) I'm so relieved. Its lovely to think of life stretching before me with no college and no exams. I have a chance now to get on with all the other things I've wanted to do, but studying took up too much of a chunk of time to be able to commit too. Most of them are on the list of course!

I know I couldn't have done it with the friends who drove me to college, those who helped me revise, the ones I knew were praying for me and the ones I didn't know about and everyone who just believed I could it. Corny, but true, so thanks :)

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