I'm Phoebe Scanlon. I am studying at the moment at QUT. I'm studying a bachelor of
business majoring in accounting and I work in the Business Services service line in Brisbane at BDO.
I worked here as a vacationer and I just had so many opportunities in that role from compliance
work, tax, to actual advice, succession planning and it was all so interesting to
me that I thought Business Services would be the way to go. BDO would be the way to
go. The team was amazing I couldn't tell you enough how helpful everyone was - the culture
just made me want to stay here, so much so when I got the offer I was like "yes!".
So, Business Services the clients range fairly widely from just individuals who would like
their tax returns done to big groups, family groups, and there's a lot of in between as well.
So we have individuals, partnerships, trusts, small businesses, large businesses, big groups,
and Business Services is a really good place if you like people because you
get to interact with not only your team and other departments in BDO but also the clients
themselves. And it's often because of the sort of clients we interact with it's mostly people
who are actually involved in the business like families who love their businesses
and really are there to get help and to see where they can take their business.
The culture is part of the reason I really wanted to stay so BDO's culture is very open,
very friendly, very helpful...they really...I only learned about the values after I'd started
working as a vacationer but everyone in BDO really embodies the values:
'human' - everyone's helpful and happy to be here and 'one' - we all want to work together,
'bold' - we're all very happy and social it's just such a good place to work.
There was a family group who owned a really big plot of land
and they were all getting a little bit older, the brothers, and they were trying to work
out what to do with it because none of the kids were really all that keen on farming.
And just how different all of the brothers were in terms of what their thinking was and what their
succession sort of plans were and being able to actually pull that together and give them a
plan that they all were happy with and would work for the family that was so interesting. I was so
excited to be able to work on that and working with a lot of people in the team but also the
Partners as well. The depth of experience that the Partners had in that situation was amazing.
I was always more interested in sort of the tax accounting side but at university
the sort of subjects that were more focused on big clients like the audit subjects just
didn't really appeal to me all that much. I felt like there wasn't really a personal touch there
and then I got to actually experience the Business Services service line as a vacationer and there
really was that like family touch, the sort of, more focus on building the relationships with the
whole company as well as the person, and that's what really drew me to Business Services because
there is a lot of tax and accounting work and Business Services like personal tax returns,
fringe benefits, you're dealing with CGT and GST and all those sort of things. And
actually doing the accounting, creating the financial statement to populating tax returns,
all that sort of thing, but you actually also get to build those relationships strongly with like an
entire company, and with individuals as well, which I've always really been more drawn to.
Working as an undergrad has
been so helpful for my studies. I can't even tell you how often something's been explained
to me at work and then I learned about it two weeks later in like my tax course or whatever,
um, so it's actually that practical aspect as well. When you're learning you're thinking,
"I know how this is going to be useful" or "I know how I can build on this for the future" as well.
I did one course last year that was technically an elective subject it was
like laws of business entities and it's been so useful I can't even tell you. We deal with so
many trusts and Partnerships and universities, very company focused, so actually having that
subject there but also then being able to use it and understand what's going on is so amazing.
My long-term goal at the moment is just to do my CAs, probably another three
years it's probably a medium term goal. But I absolutely can do that at BDO the
support that I've had even as an undergrad to go and I just did my exam block go into study
and then come back and do work for two weeks is good so...and there are so many people on
my team who are doing their CA. There's so much support there but there are also people on my
team who are just studying because they want to and the support there for that is also amazing
so I can't think of anything that I'd want to do that I wouldn't be able to do at BDO.
So I started as a vacationer, just picking Business Services as the sort of vacational role,
but the vacation program at BDO is very set up to offer as much opportunity as possible. And there's
a lot of interaction with the other vacationers too, there's a lot of opportunity to talk to them
and to interact and part of that is the vacation and charity drive which was so much fun and such
a good opportunity for everyone. Also just the vacationer program in Business Services was
really good they really offered so many things for me to try, so I got to just do the sort of
tax stuff which I love. It's so nice to just sort of sit down and do an individual tax return but
there was like management accounting stuff as well and then the sort of succession planning
type things that I was helping out with, writing reports, so sort of a wide range of things that
I was able to do in Business Services really encouraged me to apply to Business Services.