Practical accounting days: building the bridge between the professional and academic environment

Hello Alex, thank you for taking the time to chat with us today! Alongside your Automation and Innovation team, you facilitated recently, one of the workshops for the latest edition of Practical Accounting Days, a project brought to life by our friends at ASCIG. 

From your experience so far, being involved in the project, can you give us an overview of this year’s edition, in terms of theme, the information delivered and activities?

Of course, I’d be happy to share more about that. This edition is the second one I helped organise, and the year-to-year improvement felt massive for our team. We have a very strong relationship with feedback, so from the moment we signed up to host and organise this year's edition, we looked at how participants perceived our previous events within Practical Accounting Days. Thus, we took into consideration all the received feedback, from the structural recommendations for the event, all the way to the presented content. This time around we made sure to put "Practical" at the core of our activities, striving to find a balanced method of delivering actionable tasks in a real and up-to-date accounting environment, while also keeping students interested.

How was your experience facilitating this workshop, how was the interaction with the students who visited us?

This edition, I felt a lot more engagement from our guests, compared to last year, and this is a valid sign that practicality brings attendees closer to the presenters. Most participants were curious to know more about our roles in the company, with our responsibilities and areas of expertise, as well as insights into why things work the way they do. I consider the workshop to be a resounding success, since I also managed to learn some new things during the event I helped host. Coming from an Automation background, it was also a great benefit for me to be able to learn aspects of tasks I'm not usually directly involved in, but that are still integral to understanding the bigger process I'm part of.

Let’s dive a bit further into your role within Forvis Mazars in Romania, that of an Automation Consultant. How long have you been part of the company and how did your career path look like up until now?

I started my journey at Forvis Mazars in Romania about 2 years ago. Initially, I joined as an intern, with the purpose of completing my Mandatory Practice Course in university. A few months later, my internship was complete, and I proposed the idea of joining the Automation team indefinitely, as a part-time student employee. My manager agreed and that was the moment where things started opening up with plenty of opportunities.

I started working with new technologies for Automation, proposing ideas for our teams, taking part in events (such as PAD), collaborating with the Marketing and Communication team for interviews and even becoming part of a Global team providing technical expertise training for all Forvis Mazars employees, all around the world.

What does a normal day in the life of an Automation Consultant look like? Take us through your tasks and responsibilities.

In my role here at Forvis Mazars, I take care of multiple stages of the Automation process, from conducting the business analysis of the process we want to improve, all the way to testing, implementing and providing maintenance for the solution. Most of my time is spent on developing and testing, since these two stages take the most amount of time and are essential to the reliability and stability of the solution. Alongside these two stages, I take up new projects, by providing business analysis for new requests, I provide maintenance for existing and running projects, or I take part in other activities, such as hosting technical webinars or researching new solutions and technologies for our teams.

What are some of the elements that compose the skillset of an Automation Consultant and what would be a good way for a student to acquire them?

There are some essential skills you should have when you take on such a position. Among the most important ones I can mention the attention to detail, patience, logical thinking, creativity and time management abilities. The latter might come in handy more times than you would have expected. I would say that most of them you can acquire or improve as you go through your career, so even if you feel like you lack some skills at the beginning, that shouldn't be enough to prevent you from trying. As for the technical aspect of the job, it's nothing you can't learn by yourself. I personally began learning the basics in my free time and developed them as I worked on real cases.

Following the name of the project itself, what practical advice would you offer to both the students that you had the opportunity to interact with, and the young professionals at the beginning of their career?

When it comes to practical advice, the best you can do is not overthink it. Whatever it is you want to pursue, you should take concrete actions towards achieving it. Take the first step even if you don't know where the second step follows. Getting stuck in a rut of "it's too difficult" or "other people are way more qualified" will get you nowhere. Have some trust in yourself, and you will see yourself succeeding.

Thank you, Alex, for all of your interesting insights! I’m sure they will be highly appreciated by our readers. To the students that visited us for our Practical Accounting Days workshop, we hope to see you again very soon!