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Five questions and answers about starting your career in Forensics
29/01/21
In October 2020, at our career webcast, we shared a great first dive into the world of Forensics, its core services and competencies. To continue sharing our professional knowledge, we gathered some of the questions you had during our webcast and presented them to Pierre Kilian, our director in Forensics. Read here, what he told us about starting a career in Forensics.
- What qualifications do I need to join Forensics?
Forensics is a broad field and we usually look for three to four areas of qualification: the first one is a strong accounting or finance background such as the swiss CPA. If you don’t exactly know what to study or you’re still trying to figure out what you might want to do, finance studies can give you a good first insight on how the financial services work in general. It’s a great platform to develop your further career.
The second useful qualification is “legal”. Since the Forensics’ work involves restoring and helping clients bring back damages, a colleague with a legal background in the team helps immensely.
A third focus lays on a law enforcement background. We learned that any candidate that understands investigations has a feeling for Forensics as well. Being close to law enforcement and understanding the latest professional trends in these areas can help a Forensics team immensely.
While naming three comprehensive qualifications, I also want to emphasise that our team has a wide range of backgrounds. Some of our colleagues even started off as engineers – and I bet at the beginning, they never imagined pursuing their career in Forensics.
- What do you look for in a trainee candidate?
As a trainee, you should enjoy solving complex puzzles and you should be curious enough to look outside of the box for finding new possible solutions to an issue. Don’t shy away from voicing the most unusual opinion – we especially value the fresh and open view of a trainee, that might give us new insights after looking at the same spreadsheet for weeks and weeks. Trying to put the pieces of our puzzle together with such an open-minded person is joyful for both the trainee and the team. This will make “enthusiasm” and the will to learn and explore the most important things that we look for in a future trainee – and the biggest part of being successful at PwC.
- Can I apply without professional experience?
Yes! We take candidates directly from university, so usually people that have just finished their degree and/or their master’s in a specific field of expertise, which really depends on the type or role we need to fill.
- What should I mention in my cover letter?
The first advice for a motivation letter, for a job in Forensics, is applicable to every cover letter: be honest! There are a lot of competitors, and when you reach out to us for a job, take the chance to be transparent and give us a glimpse of you even before we meet you in person. Tell us why solving a puzzle is a big part of you and what you feel is most important to you about finding solutions for small and big problems.
In Forensics, we can really see the change that we make in life and in society – it is always rewarding when your work locks up the fraudster or gathers money that you then return to the community, which is the case when we work for NGOs. Those moments make working in Forensics worthwhile and give everyone in the team a good feeling.
So, knowing your personality and your drivers through your cover letter does show us your motivation for working in Forensics and we are able to then see the match with our team.
- How does a workday look like for an intern?
Our workdays don’t usually follow a certain routine. I still remember the day when I was an intern, on which my manager came to me and said that we would be flying to Congo to solve a problem in a mine.
So we flew, and directly after we arrived, I found myself with three other people in a room in Congo, counting an amount of fifty thousand dollars – all five-dollar notes or smaller – of petty cash, which is the small amount of cash for paying small expenses. It turned out that the books said there were sixty thousand dollars. So, after controlling their expenses by hand, we took a walk around the area and had the chance to get a better understanding of their business and tasks first-hand. I then spent the next day entirely on sorting out their paperwork. This seemed like a dull job, but after those papers were in an order, we were able to better analyse the company’s problem and – together with our observations from our tour of the grounds – to find that there must have been problems with properly weighing the correct amount of in- and outgoing copper. It took us another two weeks of observing, understanding and finally helping the local people with writing a report and finding a solution for their problem.
While such a special work task or trip, of course, is not happening every other week, it still shows how our atypical or “typical” workdays can be. Tasks and projects can vary from day to day, which is making our job very exciting for everyone who is open-minded and curious.
If you want to know more about the work in Forensics, click here to re-watch our webcast and to get to know our teams in Forensics and the work they develop.
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