Deliotte Apprenticeship (ACA) v degree

[Blubell46]

Hello,

My dd is in Year 13 and is applying to uni to study economics and has also applied for apprenticeship course.

She has got an apprenticeship offer from one of the Big4 accountancy to study ACA ( professional qualification).

Just wondering if anyone has a child studying an Apprenticeship and feels they missed out on the Uni life? Or feel that future employers see them differently to graduates?

Just trying to balance both sides of the arguments. Any advice will be appreciated.

Thank you

At 18, she could be looking at another 50 years of working life. On that basis, why not give Deloitte a go?

If it doesn’t work out because she failed exams, she can get some other work and apply to uni for the next year.

If she completes it but doesn’t want to do that for the rest of her life, she can go to uni at 21 or 22, having earned money to pay for it.

If she enjoys it but finds career progression hampered by lack of degree, she’d be likely to be accepted into a Masters (could do it part time) with her work experience and qualifications.

My friend’s son is doing this albeit with a smaller company. He’ll be a fully chartered CA at the end with no debt. He’s really enjoying it.

Loved uni! Fantastic times had.

but in this day and age, lots of uncertainty, plus with a name like Deloitte on your cv, I would run, not walk, to do it.

Pros: well respected qualification, no student debt, good pay, good work experience, big 4 so probably a reasonable size cohort and good social life. Also, was a while back, but a friend did this then converted hers to an accountancy degree with not too much work as she had a lot of exemptions from ACA. Not sure if that's still possible. Also it's 3 years and then you have lots of options open to you either transferring internally or externally.

Cons: it's hard work. Really hard. As you go through you can do really long hours. If you fail exams, they can kick you out. Need a good level of maturity as you will be working under pressure for different people every few weeks, at different locations sometimes with clients who actively don't want you around. Your friends might be partying and experiencing life differently and it's easy to be envious.

For anyone reading this, can I add that there’s several strands of accountancy. I thought it was ‘book-keeping’ on a grander scale. However, there’s lot of different strands - some is more consulting, business advice or restructuring, or tax (🙁) etc.

If she wants to be an accountant, if she does an accountancy degree, she will still need to complete ACA upon completing her degree, I worked with many accountancy graduates who did not realise this!

If a university degree experience is embraced robustly by the student, the development of core critical thinking skills is elevated through working/studying/assessment in holistic ways. However, degree apprenticeships (is it an ACA or a degree apprenticeship?) are also effective in this way and tend to produce well rounded individuals with fantastic employability skills.

I think there is an element of FOMO but if she is with other like minded young people in the apprenticeship cohort, she will develop some of those life long skills and networking.

With the pressures I see students facing today through cost of living, I'm honestly not sure that the view of golden days of finding yourself and developing friendships aren't a thing of the past.

DD is doing economics at uni and the experience overall hasn’t been what she hoped for. The course is very good but the rest of the experience has been disappointing and not what she expected. She’s now got the debt too.
Your daughter has nothing to lose by doing the apprenticeship. If it’s not for her she can then go to uni with some money under her belt.

DH is big 4 trained and a CFO. I showed him this thread. His reply:

Don’t bother with a degree in business and finance as the employees spend more time unpicking what they’ve been taught and then reteaching them the right technical skills. He would rather recruit a university graduate who had a degree in an academic subject and then qualified.

A degree is not necessary and a big 4 apprenticeship is a great opportunity. If she turned it down and went to uni she would then be applying for a training position she has just been offered and declined, only in debt.

However, she would be missing out on the uni years. And after she had qualified at the age of 21 she would be in competition for jobs against 24 year olds who would have the same qualifications but more life experience. The apprenticeship would probably tie her to Deloittes for longer (ie 6 years) which is fine if this is what she wants.

Moving up the career ladder, recruitment is based on work experience and being capable of doing the job. No one cares about which uni you go to and even though DH went to a top uni this has had no impact on his later roles.

These training apprenticeships are like gold dust and shouldn’t be dismissed lightly. But uni is a great way of developing social contacts and independence.

What it boils down to is practicalities, where will your DD live, will she have friends her own age? Will she commute? The working hours will be long.

We have a child in Year 13 so it’s interesting to compare the two DCs. Would our DC want to go straight into the work force after school? No. Not that they’re work shy (far from it) but this isn’t the right path at the moment. Does your DD want to go straight into work? If so, then the apprenticeship is for her and many many congratulations on being offered a wonderful opportunity.

My DC’s teacher has a DD currently undertaking an accountancy apprenticeship. She is loving it and it was absolutely the right decision for her.Good luck and let us know what your DD decides. We’re all rooting for her.

Apply to uni and accept the apprenticeship. Defer the uni place for a year on the basis that she has a relevant apprenticeship. Her options are then kept open.

That is what DS has done (although not in finance). He absolutely loves his apprenticeship though and cannot believe he's having his degree paid for and getting paid as well. He's working as part of a professional team already working on internal and external projects. He lives away from home in a shared house and is loving the independence.

I know quite a few of the kids from his school are at uni and not really enjoying it, it just doesn't seem to be the experience they hoped for and it's costing them a lot of money.

100% take the apprenticeship and get paid to lean rather than pay to learn.
DD will meet loads of other grads and young people at work and in 3 years time she'll be on a good salary with no loan to pay off.

I don’t agree that AI will replace accountancy jobs at the level your DD would be going for with an ACA /ICAEW post grad qualification under her belt. Like a PP said it’s not just enhanced bookkeeping. Deloitte is a professional services firm & the roles ACA qualifiers move into are highly skilled. The profession & qualification is embracing AI etc from what I can tell.
Some posters are calling it a degree apprenticeship but that’s misleading (unless I’ve misunderstood). The Apprenticeship will be L7 which is ABOVE degree level. She’ll gain the ACA qualification but have no degree. There are many on this thread that have said they’ve done this and it hasn’t hampered them career wise.

I went to uni and then did an ACA qualification at a big 4 company, my thoughts are that the lack of degree won't matter if she does the apprenticeship and gets the ACA. The ACA is really hard work so she'd need to be serious about commitment and study. Hardest thing I've ever done but so glad I did. Uni isn't for everybody but the question is whether your DD might miss out if she doesn't go, I think that largely depends on personality.

For my DC, the school leaver L7 accountancy apprenticeship has been the absolute making of them. They did participate in various Y11 and Y12 online and in-person accountancy career events and programmes which (along with uni Open Days and various uni-based online and in-person programmes) meant they had a good understanding of what they were signing up to and what they were ruling out. They turned down viable offers for entry to competitive uni courses.

The key at that age is relative maturity, a thirst for early independence (often fired up by experience of enjoying paid work during 6th form years, inc the maturing of social skills and outlook driven by that) and a preference for the iterative approach of structured learning that can be put into practice day-to-day. For my DC, I'd say the general expectation has been to perform 4 years ahead of their actual age ie be a 22 yo at 18. That is not for everybody but, for them, has meant an amazing trajectory in terms of client exposure, day-to-day managerial responsibilities and being heavily involved in initiatives with high internal profile.

@StamppotAndGravy

"Accountancy is something that is at high risk of AI automation in the next decades. "

I see this a lot of mn. I completely disagree. Most accountants are already aware of this comment, already working with AI, making it work for themselves, and their end personal advice to clients isn't at any more risk than any other profession.

Plus, Is uni all that these day? Will OP's dd really be missing out? Me thinks possibly not. Btw, many posters on this thread and on mn generally post about their dc not getting as much out of uni as expected. My ds is loving his uni atm, but I too question how great uni is these days, post Covid, the fact they are a business that needs to make money more so today than ever. Sometimes not as much fun as when I was there, (old hag who was there donkeys years ago, one of the last to go with no fees).

This is a good idea

Apprenticeship all the way.

At age 61, looking back, uni was a waste of time and money ( i have two degrees.)

Unless one is in a hardcore STEM field, it's not what you know, it's who you know.

One can always engage in lifelong learning outside of work hours.

I would grab the apprenticeship with both hands. She will have a good social life at Deloitte with the other apprentices and grads. I started life at EY and it was loads of fun. Far better than uni.

ACA is a very flexible and well regarded qualification. There are many opportunities beyond the Big 4.

Having a Bachelor’s degree falls away very quickly as a job requirement. My husband doesn’t have one (dropped out of his Maths degree) and it has genuinely never held him back at his career in FAANG companies.

Other English speaking countries have a vocational path to ACA ie. you must study accountancy at university. It doesn’t produce a less well rounded individual or lesser accountant than someone who has done Geography and joined a Big 4 graduate scheme.

I trained at Deloitte as a grad in early 00s. There were scholars who were apprenticed since 17-18 and they went back to uni later. There were also school leavers.

They were the minority then whereas the graduate intake was huge - I enjoyed Deloitte training days apart from juggling the professional exams. Kind of like another 3 years of university but paid.

I then moved into industry (like many passed first time with flying colours but hated accountancy, btw). Met a small but now growing number of people across various roles, not just finance, without degrees. All were from a mix of working to upper middle class backgrounds, and had either chose not to go to uni, and worked since 16/18, or dropped out of uni halfway. They all had various professional qualifications and were on very good 6 figure income. It was a non sequitur for me. Both DH and I didn't think it was even an option, because of the way the previous generation (not just our parents, who were a mix of grads and non grads) presented university as the ONLY default path.

Now i am in two minds what value uni adds. One negative i can think of not going to uni is that between 18-25, unlike those people I met who didn't go to university, I was extremely immature and not driven yet (between 16-20 i was fired from a number of casual jobs), so for me i think university and then grad scheme was the better path.

I find this so sad. I know lots of students always only viewed the degree as a route into work but they're missing out on so much. I know you can go back and do a curiosity degree later in life, but the flexibility and speed of thinking in youth can never be replicated. Real study is like learning a language. I agree with everyone that the apprenticeship will probably get the best career results medium term, but what happened to pure curiosity beyond materialism!

Congratulations to your DD, OP. This offer is a great opportunity.

Skipping university (now) risks losing a chance to acquire an enlarged and more nuanced world view. I agree with @sendsummer ’s post in theory. However I am not at all sure that the majority of today’s students are looking for this sort of development. Students committed to it can certainly find it, and staff adore them, but in STEM which I know even at excellent universities most are quite career orientated. This is a similar attitude to an apprenticeship.

Past a certain point one’s career development is more likely to be about what you’ve done and who you know than your educational qualifications. The more accomplished you are, the earlier that point arrives.

If DD starts an apprenticeship and decides it wasn’t right (or is asked to leave) I agree that having been selected for Deloitte will only be an asset to later university applications, if she provides a coherent narrative (insofar as the new UCAS format will allow). I say that as a former Russell Group admissions tutor.

So it comes down to what DD’s inner voice is telling her to do. My firm belief is that young people do best when they follow it to the extent practicable. DD cannot really go wrong.

I think it very much depends on how they are performing on the job as well, if someone is performing well work wise and showing promise they are more likely to be given another chance. Also not sure if it happens with apprenticeships or even graduate intake anymore but big 4 used to take on more than they needed on the expectation that some would fail and leave so if that’s still the case the whether they kept you may also depend on who else has failed/passed

As someone who’s done it, I’d do it again in a heartbeat. It won’t matter a jot that she doesn’t have a degree, if anything I’ve found it to be an asset in that employers are very impressed I managed to join a prestigious big4 company straight from school and keep up with the graduates.

I have to laugh at the person who said doing ACA pigeon holes you into accountancy, what a complete load of ignorant rubbish. Take a look at the annual accounts of any major company and you will see many non-finance post holders who hold an ACA qualification and it’s something that’s common for CEOs too. Working at a Big4 firm will massively open doors for your daughter, way more so than any degree will and once qualification has been achieved, there are many well paid careers she can pursue.

I was earning 100k by my late 20s and now work in a different field, in a low stress 35 hour a week job earning the same, should be on track for a C-suite level role in the next ten years should I choose to go for it.

It’s hard work the training, but the social life is really good and it opens a lot of doors, especially as a woman, to have a well paid and flexible career.

I agree with your post just above, @StamppotAndGravy . I was also a UG during hard times and my friends and I had a wonderful time with The Big Questions. I think we were quite typical.

My sense is that there is genuinely a much greater career focus now. I suspect the reasons are complex.

The apprenticeship route is a brilliant offer IF it will work for your daughter.

It’s important to remember that apprentices are proper employees, with the same expectations as other employees in a professional setting. Some young people just aren’t mature enough for that, and that’s fine, but if they’re not it can go badly wrong and quickly. This happened to one of our students - fantastic academically, got a degree apprenticeship, absolutely bombed it as he lacked life skills and maturity and was sacked. He’s now at uni and loving it, but really struggled to get his head around the opportunity he’d done himself out of. So I think it’s important to go into a degree apprenticeship with your eyes wide open as to what’s expected.