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Women in Leadership
Name: Hannah Johnson
Role: Restructuring Manager
Company: Grant Thornton – international accounting firm
A bit about you: I’m a graduate from the University of Bath, finishing in 2016. I have worked at Grant Thornton (GT) since January 2017, completing an accounting qualification called the ACA (associate chartered accountant) in my first three years there. In December 2020 I moved to my current department (Restructuring) from working in the audit department. I currently live in London, near to Tower Bridge and enjoy socialising, going to the gym and playing in the GT netball team.
What is it like working in your company? Everyone in the company that I have come across is friendly and willing to help. This makes working here enjoyable and you get to make lifelong friends too. The work I do is quite varied, I work with companies that are struggling financially and either help them perform better or help them to close down whilst maximising the amounts the company can pay to the people it owes money to. Because of this variation in work, I will work on several projects a year with new companies and new colleagues each time. My work is therefore very varied and I am always learning a lot and taking on new responsibilities.
Why did you decide to go into your chosen field? I chose my field because when I was at university I did a placement year working at a corporate finance advisors. This company would advise on other company purchases or sales. I was a researcher in the team, so I took a very ‘back office’ role, meaning I didn’t have much client interaction. I noticed that all of my client-facing colleagues had an ‘ACA’ accounting qualification, because it provides a really solid groundwork for understanding business, how they work and how they record their financial information. I decided that I wanted to have a career in business and finance and that I should start by undertaking the ACA qualification. I started this at GT because I like their ethos and I found the recruitment process the best out of the other firms I applied to.
What qualifications and work experience did you need to reach your current position? My main requirement has been the ACA qualification, which involved completing 15 exams, over three years whilst working too. The qualification also requires a certain number of days of relevant work experience, which I obtained from performing my job. I obtained this experience from working in the audit department, which involved assessing and corroborating different companies annual financial statements. The job required a lot of accounting knowledge as well as an awareness of where a company might have made an error in their financial statements or where they were most likely to purposefully make their financial statements look better than they were. Once I had this three years of experience in audit and my ACA qualification, I was able to reassess what department in GT I wanted to work in, leading me to move to the Restructuring department. To reach my current level of ‘Manager’ I had to work hard on projects and take on responsibility that challenged me. I also had to gain a breadth of experience in the different types of projects the department works on.
What do you enjoy the most about your job? The different learning opportunities and ways to analyse businesses. I also enjoy learning from the senior members of my team (partners and directors) who have many years of experience in business and financial advisory.
What obstacles have you overcome in your career? Working and studying for exams at the same time is a big obstacle and commitment in my chosen career. However, joining the firm with other people going through the same thing means you can all work together to revise and have people going through the same pressures as you, which really helps. There are also a lot steps to the recruitment process which can be daunting when you start to apply.
Why do you think it is important to have a strong female representation in your industry? Yes – my industry is often male-dominated, particularly as your progress to more senior roles. I think having a female role model helps to give confidence and inspiration to females who are just starting their careers in this industry.
What advice would you give those wanting to take a similar career path? Go for it! My career path is often labelled as just ‘accountancy’ which people stereotype as ‘boring’. However, doing actual accounting isn’t really part of my job, I just have to have an understanding of how it works. If you have a logical and problem-solving mindset and find it interesting how businesses actually work then this is definitely a great career path. Any relevant work experience always helps to get into this career, but ultimately having an enthusiasm to work and learn which you can show to the employer is what makes people stand out when applying for these roles. Also it’s a career you can get into from a school leaver age as well as a university graduate! The school leavers at my firm would pursue an AAT (associate accounting technician) qualification prior to their ACA qualification and would complete both qualifications over five years. So if you don’t want to go to university and want to get straight into work then that is also an option in my career path.
