Practical work experience FAQs

Practical work experience is undertaking real-life work of a financial, business and/or commercial nature. Your work experience will need to be completed in at least one of the following six categories:

• Accounting
• Audit and assurance (audit is not compulsory)
• Taxation
• Financial management
• Information technology
• Insolvency.

Your work experience can be in just one of these technical categories, or in more than one area. Either way, it must expose you to as many practical assignments, finance functions and/or clients, in as many different sectors as possible. Your work experience must also incorporate levels of responsibility that increase in depth and scope throughout the course of your training.

You cannot count study leave, courses, sickness days, holidays or office administration as part of your practical work experience requirements. These cannot be counted because any practical work experience work you do needs to demonstrate that you are gaining real-life experience of a business, commercial or financial nature.

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Yes – unless you are:

• an ACA student who is eligible for a two year period of approved training. In this instance you are required to complete 300 days; or
• you are studying the ACA in a country where a memorandum of understanding (MoU) exists between your local institute and ICAEW which may recognise the work experience you have already completed as part of the qualification from your local institute.

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As you progress through the ACA, you will log the number of days in the practical work experience tab of your online training file. You are required to add the number of days during or after your six-monthly review. To keep a record of the number of work experience hours you complete, you might want to do this by using a timesheet or note the hours in your diary.

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A day is seven hours long.

Yes, it is possible to have a training agreement with employers in practice, industry, the public sector or not-for-profit sectors. Employers must be an ICAEW authorised training employer or principal in order for students to gain practical work experience.

Your employer or principal will need to extend the length of your training agreement accordingly. Please not your training agreement can be a maximum of 60 months in duration.

We do not encourage students to change employer during their training agreement.

If students do need to have a new employer part way through their training agreement, the new employer (which must be an authorised training employer or principal) can decide how much of a student’s previous work experience to count. They are not obliged to count all of it.

Make sure that your practical work experience, and audit experience if applicable, is up to date and confirmed on your online training file before it is cancelled by your employer.

You are not required to keep any records as an independent student as you will only be able to complete 14 out of the 15 examinations. Once you have obtained a training agreement and registered for this you will need to record practical work experience, professional development, ethics progress and audit time if applicable.

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You should record your experience regularly – and discuss your practical work experience progress (along with your professional development, ethics and exams) at your six-monthly reviews with your employer or principal. You must make sure that you have all your records up to date and that they are signed off at least every six-months throughout your training.

As soon as you are eligible, at the end of your training agreement, we’d encourage you to submit your training records to us. However you do have 12 months from the end date of your agreement to sign off your online training file before it is locked, if this is the case then you will need to complete a manual sign off.

Yes you need to continue your training agreement until your expected end date. The requirements are that you complete all ACA exams, a minimum 36 month training agreement and at least 450 days practical work experience.

This highlights the need for six-monthly reviews. Any performance issues should be addressed with the student during the review process. If an employer or principal is unhappy with the quality of work produced by a student, then we would advise them to discuss extending the period of training until the student has met the goals put in place.

If you are re-registering into a training agreement, the minimum agreement duration must be 3 month and you must obtain at least 65 practical work experience days.

If you work for a registered auditor which is authorised to offer adequate audit training you may be able to log time towards the UK Audit Qualification. You can log your audit experience within the Audit qualification tab in your online training file.

Make sure that you record your audit experience throughout your ACA training and agree the number of days at each six-monthly review. The authorised individual will also need to enter their feedback in a timely manner. If you don’t claim your audit experience within six months of the end date of your training agreement, you will lose it.

• Find out more about the Audit Qualification