Nearly 3 months here at Cadbury Schweppes and my Geordie accent is softening, my use of "canny" and "whey aye man" is diminishing, and people are actually starting to understand me rather than staring blankly when I speak!! I'm even beginning to see that there is good nightlife other than that of Newcastle (just don't tell anyone I said that!)
So, what have I done in my first 3 months with Group Audit?
Well, surprisingly no travel (except an overnight trip to Sheffield), but even more surprisingly this hasn't bothered me, as I've enjoyed my time here so much (and I've got some good trips coming up!). Some of the varied things I've done so far include:
- Taking minutes at the Sarbanes-Oxley weekly meeting (quite scary for someone who hadn't even heard of Sox before that!).
- Designing posters for our team meeting - yes really, I went home two days in a row with marker pen all over my hands!
- S404 testing including taking a sample of 30 POs to check they'd been authorised properly (maybe not my most exciting task).
- Looking at hedging (nothing to do with gardening as I naively thought) as part of a commodities audit.
- A review of HR and the leaver's process.
Last week, I got the chance to spend a day out in sales. As someone who previously always saw themselves in the glamorous world of sales and never in the stuffy world of finance (it's only for people who did maths, further maths and then advanced maths at Uni right??), it was a really interesting day and made me realise that:
- I'd be rubbish in sales
- It's really hard to be nice for a FULL day
- Sales is not as glamorous as I first thought (at least not when you first begin)
- I actually really like finance!!
Right now I'm finishing my commodities audit and planning my next audit, and first real trip away - a 3 week tour of Central Europe taking in Prague, Budapest, Slovenia, Slovakia and Romania. It's the audit that EVERYONE wanted to do and I've had countless offers of people offering to swap a trip to Nigeria for it, but I figure that after 3 months of being in the UK I deserve to go somewhere exciting!! Before I head off there though, I've got an even more exciting trip back home so I'd better run over to the staff shop and buy up 5 times my weight in chocolate to take up North for friends and family - after 3 months the novelty still hasn't worn off!
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