“Training as an auditor has always been seen as a good career route for accountants who can then go on to do any number of other things. An auditor’s skill set needs to be very broad, whereas many other areas in accountancy have a narrower focus without the same transferable skills.” So says freelance lecturer and writer John Selwood, interviewer for this series of videos. 

Selwood is keen to emphasise the changing nature of a career in audit, with the use of technology providing more and better organised information for the auditors of the future to exercise their skills. 

For this new series of videos, Selwood spoke to a range of people who have chosen to make audit their career, finding out why they went into it in the first place and, more importantly, what they have gained from it and how they see the future of audit. 

Julia Penny, ICAEW President 2022-2023, trained as an auditor, and has spent much of her working life training and supporting auditors. Hers hasn’t been a linear career path, moving from audit to a brief stint in insolvency and back to the technical and training side. As she says: “You’ve got to wriggle around a little bit on your career path and be flexible.”

Like Selwood, Penny is enthusiastic about the use of new technology and its implications for day-to-day audit work: “I think in five years, and certainly 10 years, it may leave us not unrecognisable, but significantly different. Lots more focus, I hope, on the judgments, on the complicated areas.”

Tim Rush, Audit Partner, KPMG, may have spent most of his career with KPMG, but during that time has had 10-12 different jobs, including a secondment in New Zealand. “It wasn’t that I wanted to be a partner at KPMG from day one,” says Rush. “Throughout my career, I’ve always sought out opportunities to develop myself, asking: ‘What can I do to improve me, to be better at the job?’” 

Louise Hallsworth, Audit Partner, Baxter & Co, is keen to emphasise that there is no one-size-fits-all career path, and newly qualified auditors shouldn’t be in too much of a hurry when it comes to progressing their careers. “I think people have to be very careful not to jump ship as soon as they qualify. My advice to anyone would be just bide your time for a little while. Just get your feet under the table and see what you really do and don’t want to do.”

Aiming for partner is one career path, but Rachel Davis, Managing Director, Just Audit, chose a different direction. She started her own firm, concentrating purely on audit and working alongside general accountancy practices and the client businesses being audited. “What I am doing now is really exciting,” she says. “Developing the practice, developing the team, winning new work – and I will always remember the first few times I won a piece of new work.”

• A longer version of this article appears in Audit & Beyond, the Audit and Assurance Faculty’s online content hub.