Preston youngsters hit lucky with MJH Accountants

One major challenge facing young people trying to get their careers under way is gaining work experience. They must have heard the phrase “previous experience required” a tiring amount of times, but how on earth are they going to gain any practical experience if no-one is willing to give them the opportunity?

Luckily, three local youngsters looking for hands-on accountancy experience came up trumps this summer. Each one had approached several accountancy firms in the area, in the hope of gaining work experience and establishing whether this career path was actually the right one for them, and each managed to secure a work placement with Preston based MJH Accountants.

MJH Accountants’ ethos is very much to support the local community and encourage young people to grasp business opportunities.

Mark Hall, managing director of MJH Accountants, said: “We’re constantly receiving enquiries from youngsters keen to gain work experience and these three in particular, stood out from all the others, so we offered them work placement opportunities over the summer period. For all three young men, MJH Accountants was their first taste of putting their academic learning into practice!

"We set them work that we hoped would be interesting, challenging and offered opportunities for self-development. Each tried their hand at most aspects of accountancy work from general administration and filing to timesheet recording, updating information systems, data inputting, book-keeping and accounts preparation work.”

Each young man was very different but equally committed. Abdul, a fast learner with exceptional people skills had completed his degree course and was seeking to translate his classroom based learning to actual workplace experience. He achieved this with great ease and has subsequently gone on to secure his first accountancy post.

Sammy, in his fourth year of accountancy training thoroughly enjoyed being part of the MJH team and found adapting his classroom learning into the workplace environment an interesting challenge.

Ryan, a Preston lad, who has just completed the second year of his accountancy degree at Stirling University, found working independently and learning about the cloud based accountancy software Xero incredibly fascinating. Mark concluded: “We genuinely believe it is of mutual benefit to provide work experience to keen and enthusiastic people; they gain the valuable experience they require to move into the business world, and we gain a different perspective from youngsters just venturing into the accountancy world. We are very much champions of local young talent and look forward to welcoming more youngsters into our business.”