Experience FAQs

Work experience involves 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 work experience requirements.

• See more information on work experience

Work experience examples are available here:

• View examples here

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 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.

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 work experience.

Your employer or principal will need to extend the length of your training agreement accordingly. Please note 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 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 exams.

• Find a training agreement

You should record your experience regularly – and discuss your 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.

Yes, you need to continue your training agreement until your expected end date.

If you are re-registering into a training agreement, the minimum agreement duration must be 3 months and you must obtain at least 65 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