Why study for a data apprenticeship as an accountant? | by David Parker
With the background of a maths degree, it is perhaps unsurprising that I’d be drawn to a data apprenticeship, after all, it’s something that gives me more chance to play with numbers! However, as someone who went on to train as a Chartered Accountant and therefore has a formal qualification for a broad but prescribed career path, it may seem strange that I’m looking to do another qualification.
I’ve had a varied career path to date, starting off in audit (which I got out of as quickly as I could) then working at a range of companies from start-ups to charities, venture capital and private equity-backed businesses to now working in the public sector. One of the things I’ve learned in all of them is that data is a huge frustration to people, not just in the Finance teams but across the organisations. Being able to upskill in this area means that I can be up to date in some of the challenges faced and support with solutions.
When I saw this apprenticeship opportunity at Multiverse through Homes England, I realised it would be a great opportunity for me to codify some of the skills that I’ve built up informally over my career to date (you don’t know what you don’t know!) and also add some new skills to help shape my path in the future. I’m someone who wants to develop and learn new skills and doesn’t want to be stuck doing the same things again and again, which probably makes me ill-suited for traditional accountancy with its regular monthly processes and timetables. The opportunity to get a good grounding in areas where I’ve dabbled (such as Power BI and SQL) and then going onto Python and machine learning was something I couldn’t miss out on. I’m really excited to see how the Python and machine learning elements of the course can be applied to a Finance setting.
Another thing that really appealed to me about the apprenticeship was the practicality of it. I’ve previously done a very theoretical maths degree and then a more practical Accountancy qualification, although the vast majority of this I don’t need in day-to-day work. Whilst there are areas of the data apprenticeship that will be less relevant to me, the course is structured around projects in the workplace, which allows me to put my learnings directly into practice. The time freed up by the apprenticeship has already allowed me to create an Excel tool for a colleague, which I might not have been able to do without being on the course. I’m looking forward to taking on other challenges in the organisation over the next few months of my course.
The final reason for doing the course is that data is everywhere in organisations. Finance teams in particular deal with so much of it on a day-to-day basis. Accountancy software utilises databases and being able to understand how the data is structured there and how best to access and display will be a huge benefit to accountants in the future. Often I’ve been a part of teams who were ‘busy fools’ as we tried to corral data together rather than adding the real value and insight that we should be doing. I see a future where a lot of work is done in Finance to create automated dashboards to show data and then the work is around reviewing and interpreting these figures on a monthly basis, rather than doing a load of processes to create these dashboards manually.
I see there being some huge benefits to accountants getting more trained in data – we have some great skills to offer our organisations beyond number crunching, and getting beyond data wrangling can help to release this.
David Parker is a Data Fellowship apprentice at Multiverse based in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. He's writing for the Apprentice Lens as part of the Blogging Team. Here’s more about him:
'Hi, I’m David and I work as a Finance Business Partner at Homes England, a Government Agency. I'm a Chartered Accountant by training but have been getting more into data and modelling over the past few years. I'm really excited to be on the Data Fellowship course and the opportunity to share my journey.'