Students impress during work experience at one of the ‘Big Four’ firms

Seven Birkenhead Sixth Form College students have spent a day’s work experience at one of the world’s leading professional services firms, including taking part in a ‘Dragon’s Den’ style competition.

PricewaterhouseCoopers, or PwC, is the second largest professional services provider worldwide and is known as one of the ‘Big Four’, along with Deloitte, Ernst & Young and KPMG.

IT and Business students Syeda Aktar, Matthew Cullinane, Adam Dutton, Lucy Henshall, Jacob Owens, Owen Turner and Brandon Valentine were at PwC’s Manchester office to find out about the many branches of professional services that they offer, and also get their brains working creatively to come up with the best new app idea, with two of our students winning the competition.

Matthew and Brandon’s careers advice app impressed the judges most, while others also presented strong and innovative blueprints for healthy living, healthy eating and exercise-based apps.

Accompanying the students was College IT teacher Paul Moore.

Paul explained: “The day was led by one of PwC’s Social Mobility Officers and three Ambassadors for the company from the Data Analytics team and the Assurance team. During the day, they accessed valuable information and advice on different career programmes that PwC offer including School & College Leaver Schemes and Flying Start Degrees in a variety of areas. The students found out about some of the areas that PwC work in including Assurance, Tax and Consulting as well as Technology such as Cyber Security and ethical hacking, AI, VR, Data Analytics and Robotics. PwC as a company offers around 200 apprentice places each year nationally.”

On Matthew and Brandon winning the ‘Dragon’s Den’ contest in the afternoon section of the day, Paul said: “The ‘Dragons’ congratulated Matthew and Brandon on coming up with an excellent idea with real market potential; they were pleased with how the team had considered their target market really well and thought about how they could market the app to gain users.

“Our students found the day worthwhile and useful, especially given that over the next few months they will need to be starting to think about planning for life after College.”

Competition winner Brandon said: “Our app was a career path idea, where students, or anyone else, can put in what they’ve achieved so far and what they’re aspiring to do in the future, and the app would give them options of what to do next in terms of subjects to take at A Level or degree courses and qualifications. We thought it would be useful given our own experience of being in that position.”

Brandon concluded: “Seeing that kind of office work has made me see it as something that I’d really like to do in the future, and the whole day was really worthwhile.”

For more on studying IT at the College, click here, or click here for more on Business.