Insight on a Deloitte Careers Evening

I wrote a while ago that I wasn’t going to write another blog post about a career change…

Well, friends, I did not lie! This blog post is career-related, but it is not about a career change! I repeat: I am not changing my career path again!!! (I’m really happy about it)

Just as some background, if you haven’t been following long and arduous my career journey, I want to work in management consulting/human capital, so getting a grad scheme with the Big 4 and other big companies in the UK is my goal for this year. This means that in the next few weeks, leading up to the application deadlines, I’ll be attending as many careers events as possible. I’ll try to write about them as much as I can!

The aim of today’s blog post is to give you some insight on what a Deloitte Careers Evening entails (without giving too much away about the company itself – that’s for you to research!).

Yesterday evening, Deloitte came to the university to tell us about them as a company and give us a chance to network with them and ask any burning questions we had. The event on My Careers was called Deloitte Uncovered, but on their website, it was called an Autumn Career Evening.

They started the event with a presentation. They had Kate, a Director of Tax, come in and chat about how she got started with Deloitte, how she got to working in tax coming from an environmental business background, and what it’s like working at Deloitte; she finished off with a Q&A. Kate gave a lot of insight into the culture of the company and, she helped me in quelling any doubts of being able to enter into the world of business with a non-business degree.

After Kate’s presentation, we did a group activity. We were split up into teams by table, and we were given 5 puzzles to solve, each based on a different curiosity-driver: people (I chose this one), solutions, learning, innovation, and purpose. Each puzzle would give us a 4-number code to a padlock, which we had 5 of them to unlock (the code for which we got from the solved puzzles). The first team to unlock them won a prize.

After the group activity, a grad recruiter told us about all the programs Deloitte offers and the 5-stage selection process. They’ve got schemes for you to apply to regardless of what year you’re in! There were quite a few first years at the event last night, which made me feel like I’m doing everything late in the game, so I had to keep reminding myself that everyone is on their own journey.

After the grad recruitment talk, we had a networking session with drinks. I got to chatting with Alex, one of the consultants who came along, and got his email; it was a nice, intimate and informal way of networking, and it wasn’t scary at all. In first year I was so scared to network, but I forced myself to go to the events, so I would go to networking events and only talk to my friends! I’ve come a long way since then, but if you’re like I was two years ago, this was a really great way to gain networking experience in a friendly way.

As a side note, I just had an epiphany while writing this: I was attending networking events, but didn’t actually care to network with the attendees because I didn’t want to go into law. Of course, I didn’t know that at the time, but now I’m realising why it was so difficult to network with them – I wasn’t curious at all about what they did and what it was like to work at the firm, because that’s not what I really wanted to do. The questions came so easy last night, because I genuinely want to work in management consulting, so I was asking Alex everything I could possibly think of! That was also really reassuring, because now I’m 95% sure this is the career for me. Anyway, I digress!

I gained a lot of insight on Deloitte last night, and afterwards, I was buzzing to apply to their grad scheme! I feel like this was the pick-me-up that I needed, as I’ve really been struggling to get my grad scheme applications started. My motivations were zero, and I think I just needed to learn more about the companies I’m applying to in an interactive way. The Careers Evening was perfect for that!

Tonight, I’m attending a PwC Application Workshop, so I’m hoping it will have the same effect. If you’re interested in attending careers events, just login to My Careers and under ‘Events’, start browsing events that are happening. The Careers Development Service is here to help you, and they’ve got so many resources, including Careers Coaching (which I went to this morning, and it was so helpful) and Application Coaching (which I’m signing up for later today!). Whatever you’re struggling with, Careers have got your back!