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Brenna Fullard

It wasn’t until I started working at Deloitte that I realised that there are so many career paths in accounting and that there are so many ways that you can combine your interests into the work you do on a daily basis.

Meet Brenna, a Graduate within our Restructuring Services team in Financial Advisory.

Brenna completed a BA Business Management (HR) & BA Commerce (Accounting) at University of Queensland.

Tell us about your role at Deloitte and what it involves?

I work in Restructuring Services in the Financial Advisory service line in Brisbane. Working in restructuring services, I work with different businesses to improve their performance and maximise returns to key stakeholders.

It’s an exciting line of work as you get exposure across lots of different industries which, for me, has included working with businesses from airlines, and in healthcare, to local businesses and recently, even the running of a group of apartment buildings.

This team is involved in a lot of different types of engagements including liquidations, voluntary administrations, receiverships and turnaround/advisory work.

When we get appointed to a Voluntary Administration we get to go in and essentially become the CEO and CFO of the company and run all of the operations as if the company was our own. This is such a unique experience and you learn so much about the intricacies of how companies run, and also get to implement efficiencies and improvements to assist the company's health in the future.

What we do in restructuring impacts so many people, so you can really have an impact on a large scale.

What work have you been most excited about since starting your role?

The job I’m working on at the moment has been my favourite so far. I’m working on a public hospital engagement where we're advising the client on ways they can operate in a more efficient manner in order to optimise revenues and minimise costs, so they can reinvest into key areas of the hospital to improve patient outcomes and deliver world class hospital care.

I’m really loving working in the health sector, learning about how hospitals run and having the opportunity to do some really interesting financial analysis which we will use to substantiate our initiatives.

It wasn’t until I started working at Deloitte that I realised that there are so many career paths in accounting and that there are so many ways that you can combine your interests into the work you do on a daily basis.

For me, I have always had an interest in health, human resources and accounting but thought that because I did an Accounting and HR degree and chose to work in an ‘accounting’ firm that my work would be all numbers. However, on this engagement I have loved being able to combine my interest in health, accounting/financial analysis and human resources (as everything you do involves interactions with people) and for that reason, I’ve found this engagement especially rewarding.

What's something you've learnt about, that's surprised you on joining the Deloitte team?

I had heard about Deloitte’s ‘Global Network’ before joining the firm, but I didn’t really know what the benefit of being a part of a global firm meant for me apart from having the opportunity to do a secondment overseas later on in my career (which is very cool!).

I definitely didn’t expect that working on engagements I would be reaching out to other Deloitte offices worldwide to gather ideas of best practices, that we could then implement for our clients here in Brisbane. It’s amazing to be able to have such a massive network of people to draw on for ideas and information, and to be able to give our clients world-class advice.

It also means for us that there is no limit to how much you can learn at Deloitte as there are so many people to learn from and such a diversity of ideas.

What tips can you share with prospective graduates who are going through the application or recruitment process?

Sure, these are my top 4 tips for navigating the recruitment process:

Network - Attend student networking events and make sure you go and say hello to the Deloitte representatives with a few questions in mind. That way, later down the track when you are in the interview phase of the recruitment process and the Partner/Director asks you why you want to work for Deloitte you can give a more personalised reason as to why.

Get involved - Start building up your resume gradually over time with experiences; for example, part-time jobs, volunteer work, sporting/music activities and hobbies.

These are the things that will make you stand out from the crowd and will make you memorable, especially in your interviews. Doing these things also makes it a lot easier to answer situational based questions in interviews as you’ll have lots of experiences to draw on which brings me to point 3…

Be prepared - During the interview process you’ll be asked a lot of situational based questions that'll involve you providing examples of the time you did ‘X’. From my experience it helps to reflect on what you have done and to come up with some good examples before you go into the interview.

Also, another quick tip is to make sure that when you’re answering these types of questions, that you make sure that you're the focus of your story – the interview is about you, what you've done, how you've contributed and what you've learnt!

Lastly, be yourself! – The great thing about Deloitte is that they really encourage individuality, and for everyone to be themselves during the whole recruitment process. Don’t feel as if you need to fit into a particular mould of how you think a Deloitte person might be. If anything, it will be the unique and interesting facts about you that the interviewer will remember and that will make you stand out from other applicants.