Busting Myths About Accountancy with Karl Edge, Chief People Officer and Head of Regions at KPMG UK

I had different skills to some of the people who had grown up in a different world. Not better or worse, just a different world. And I think I realized early on I've got to play to my strengths, not try and be something that I'm not. And the reason I'm still at KPMG 34 years later is I'm still being who I am and not trying to be somebody I'm not. I think that's really important to the people listening to this. On today's episode of Careers Unwrapped, really excited to have with me Carl Edge, who's the Chief People Officer and Head of Regions at KPMG in the uk. We'll come on to what those job titles mean now. Carl brings over three decades of experience in business development as a Chartered accountant, so transitioning into various leadership roles within what is one of the world's most respected professional servicemen. He's known for his passion for personal development and also his strategic vision in leadership development and training programs. He'd been instrumental in nurturing talent and fostering a culture of excellence at kpmg. So today he's hopefully going to share insights into his career journey, the evolving role of a Chief People officer, the modern role of a Chartered Accountant, and his advice for young professionals looking to enter and thrive in this sector. So, Carl, welcome to Careers and Rap. Brilliant. Thanks, Mark. It's great to be here. That's a very kind introduction. So thank you. Sure. I'd like to, first of all, actually, I'd like to bu. Bust some myths because everyone's heard of accountancy and people have their viewpoints from the outside. So what myths do you know exist about accountancy as a career? And what can we do to bust those now? Well, the obvious one is it's boring. Yeah, accountancy is boring. Why on earth would you want to do that? And I think that it's really interesting because. Depends how you describe. Boring is what I would say to you. Because actually, if you want to have a qualification that enables you to work anywhere in the world, that enables you to work in any sector and enables you to follow a passion to do something in whatever walk of life you want, that actually, the accountancy qualification opens the door to that. And the reason I know that is because I've grown up in that world over the last 30 years and seen friends of mine who have that qualification do so many different things. Yes, I've stayed at KPMG and we'll come on to the different things I've done, but many of Them have gone out into industry, they've gone to commons overseas and they've never come back and they built their families. I also can tell you that on day one in the firm, I met my wife. So therefore it's definitely not boring because it changed my life. And we've been married 27 years now and have three daughters. Wow. Okay. Well, there's an area we might go into so you can work anywhere in any sector and meet the person you're going to marry. All in accountancy. So I see a whole new range of car bumper stickers saying accountancy is not boy. My older brother is Charter Canton, but he moved on into another sector and he's now a film and movie producer, but very much from the finance side, because you can't make anything without knowing the money. Well, if you think about the world we're in today, your ability to understand the numbers and fundings and tax positions are just really, really important to any business, any charity, any university. So this is my point about different sectors. The other thing that I think is a typical myth is people think you have got to have done accountancy at university or A level. And I think it's really important to say we look for a huge diversity of backgrounds coming into the firm and so the majority of people who join us haven't got a relevant degree. Lots of people who join us have just done A levels that don't include accountancy. People say, oh, therefore you have to have a very, very high level of maths. You need to be competent at maths. Well, I don't spend all my life with a calculator. So I just think it's really important that the whole benefit of what we do in our sector is the ability to bring people in from lots and lots of different backgrounds. And you say that you don't spend your day with a calculator. And brings me on to your job title because it includes both Chief People Officer and Head of Regions. Doesn't mention accountants at all. What is that job? Is it two jobs in one or is it one combined job? And what's in your entry at the moment sort of bring to life what's on your plate for the week ahead to tell us a bit about what the job entails. Well, what I would say is the two roles are really complementary. So there's 18,000 people in KPMG in the UK, 8,000 of them are in the regions, and the regions is everything outside of London. Actually, we're a 3 billion turnover business and a billion of our revenue is in the region outside of London. And if you think about how all our offices work outside of London, in Birmingham or in Leeds or Manchester, wherever it might be, actually there's a huge people community there. And so as part of the Chief People Officer role, there'll be no surprises that anything end to end from recruitment, from development, from learning, from pay, from reward, from career development, mentoring, coaching, all the way through to alumni, people leave us and go off and do other things, then that's what we do. And particularly for somewhere like kpmg, you know, it's our people. That's what we've got. We've got 18,000 hugely talented people. My job is to unlock their skills and help them. I always talk about how do you help them be the best they can be. And so if you look at my in tray and actually you say that this week, actually I'm in Birmingham all day tomorrow having a doing a regional strategy meeting with the heads of the big offices around the country and the heads of Audit and Tax and Legal and advisory talking about a combination of how are we doing with our clients and how people got the skills they need today and for the future. A big part of that is the IT skills people need, the AI skills that people need. A big part of that is the work this week with Cambridge University that we do around mental health because that's becoming a bigger part of thinking about how you help people with their mental health and wellbeing. But also we're finalizing our half year promotions for the 1st of April. Also we're finalizing our final numbers to come in as apprentices or graduates next September and we have a number of programs running on there. We're also finalizing our milestone events that we do when people get promoted to manager, senior manager, director and partner as part of their learning. And next week I'll be in Switzerland because we recently merged with our Swiss firm and I'm with the head of people in Switzerland, Chief people office in Switzerland and I working together on how we think about our two organizations coming together. And so is this much more of an internal facing role than a client facing one? So I have always been a client facing partner before I did this. We can get onto my career journey later on. And so I carry on out there talking to clients and CPOs of clients. Actually you touched earlier on about inclusion, diversity and that sort of background. We have a number of programs that we do with clients, so I'm part of those programmes. And so yes, from a client perspective, I'm not running the amount of clients I used to run, albeit I kept a few because it's good for your sanity and for your relevance in these sort of roles. We are ultimately a client facing organization, but actually our clients look at us to see what our learnings are in some of these people areas given we have such a focus on it. And so you work both ways. And so what is the most enjoyable part of the role today? What do you get a kick of? What sort of makes you get out of bed in the morning? Of all the responsibilities you carry? Well, you touched on it in your intro. I'm an anorex around neuroscience, completely unqualified. With just 20 years of real interest, how do you unlock the learning and the talents and the ideas of 18,000 people? What gets me out of bed every day is can I make that 5% better for everyone or even 1% better for everyone? And so what I really love is being involved in developing programs that help people develop over time. I love the mentoring side of our business, that there's people I interviewed 25 years ago who are now partner that watching those people evolve, develop, learn from their own mistakes, that's amazing. And that's the privilege of a role like this. You sort of get to touch the lives of 18,000 people. And do you still do your own mentoring one to one with people within or outside of the business? Yeah. So it's a mixture. So I'm a great believer in take five mentality, which is something that takes me five minutes but can really influence and touch the lives of somebody. And so a really good example, one of our new recruits saw me on a welcome video on their induction and I'm saying, share your ideas. They were brave enough to contact me on teams and say, I've been in the business three months, can I come and share my ideas? That's amazing. So I went and had a coffee with him and he started telling me the things we do well and the things we could do better. I love that I get a lot of energy from that. And sometimes in these roles it's easy not to do that now when you started out, you may not have envisaged what you do now as the route you would end up in, which is so common across the careers and rep conversations I had. There are so very, very few people doing now what they thought they would be doing when they started out. What first got you thinking about accountancy at all? So I come from a classic working class background. I'm one of our social mobility ambassadors now. But you go back 34 years, to be honest. I was doing theater studies and drama and I was playing football and I was going to school and I didn't have a clue what. I'd love to have played football, but I wasn't good enough, is the honest answer. I was then doing drama and I was watching people who were far better than me struggle. And so I sort of fell into, well, I'll carry on doing my A levels. And the teachers at school went, look, you can do drama, but you could do maths or you could do economics or you could do accountancy. So I did it and I quite enjoyed the accountancy bit, if I'm being honest. But also I'd got a situation at home where my dad had been made redundant and we needed to get work. And so I started doing summer work in a small accountancy firm, just through a contact who used to come into the greengrocers I work in, if I'm being honest, so. And said, well, why don't you do a few weekends and weeks with us? And so in doing that, I got to learn about the cardboard box type job. You know, someone would turn up and say, here's a box of receipts, turn it into a cash book or something. And I was like, oh, that's quite interesting. And that firm, three years later offered me a job. And I have to say, you talk about mentors and pivotal omens at the same time. I went to Birmingham Polytechnic, so I didn't go away to university, but I did do accountancy at polytechnic. And we had something called the Milk round then, many, many, many, many years ago, you might remember it. Yeah. And a manager from kpmg, Pete Marwick, as it was called then, was there, started to talk to me and I didn't know who they were, what they were. No one in my family would have any idea about this sort of stuff. And he was like, oh, come on, you're quite interesting, come on, you're a bit different, come and talk to us. So I did and one thing led to they offered me a job and I was going to say no, because I'd already got a job at this firm where I'd spent three summers working. And I went to see the partner at the small accountancy firm and went, look, this is the situation. And to his absolute credit, he went, well, you can't say no to kpmgp, Morgan. He said, I know we've worked with us, but you have to take that role. Now, if that individual had been no, you know, you've got to be loyal to us, I probably would have been loyal to them because I'd have felt really guilty and bad and I didn't know about this world at all. But that one moment, that one individual leadership act, taught me a lot and makes me think about my leadership name. When you joined Pete Marwick, as it was then, how many people would you describe you met there with your background? Other than my wife, interestingly, very few, maybe less than 10%. I always talk about the fact that growing up, I didn't know I was poor because everyone around me was exactly the same as I was. But it was only when I went into the world of a Pete Marvel, we start to realize people come from very, very different backgrounds. And how did that feel at that point in time? So that's a bit of an alien space to you both the type of business, the people you're with. Did you move away from home at that point? Was that a move to. You stayed there? No, I was still at home. Yeah. So what did that feel like in those first few days? And what did you have to do to adapt to. To fit in? What did you do? So the honest answer is I was working at weekends at the time I joined, and I carried on working at weekends for the first three months because I just assumed I didn't fit in and I'd end up leaving or they find out I wasn't good enough in the first phase of exams. So I laugh these days because funnily enough, when people joined us, they're not allowed to do a different job. And there was me for the first three months, running alongside with my job in my greengrocers type sort of thing. But I also had been bought up to go. And actually this is a pair of my parents. But listen to me, you're as good as anyone and you're better than no one. And that was my attitude. Well, I'm as good as any of these people and I'm better than none of them. And if others start to act like they're better than me, well, that's on them, not on me. I'd also been really fortunate that if you grow up in a world where I was doing theater studies and drama in the 80s, that was one of the few places people could be openly gay without fear of persecution. So I had a lot of that. I went to a school, it was hugely multicultural and played football in a team. Hugely multicultural. So I actually. I had different skills to some of the people who had grown up in a different world. Not better or worse, just a different world. And I think I realized early on I've got to play to my strengths, not try and be something that I'm not. And the reason I'm still at KPMG 34 years later is I'm still being who I am and not trying to be somebody I'm not. I think that's really important to the people listening to this. What do you think those strengths are that you play to? What are you bring? I now call it empathy, but I wouldn't have called that then. I think I was just really interested in people. I'd got a sort of learning mindset again, language I'd use today but not then. I was nosy, I was curious, I'd be like, oh, how's that work? Or because I didn't understand anything is the honest answer. So therefore I just had to keep asking questions until I did. And I guess the one thing I knew is I was a quick learner. But I also know that I've got quite a limited attention Spanish so therefore I've got to keep learning and keep doing things as I go. I think that as I got into it I learned I wasn't at that point but I learned to listen better. That's really interesting when you move on in your career to become a much more of a client facing person now in the CPO role, my job is to listen and then understand and I think it's those sort of things. And then the other thing that I was always called out for was my positive energy that I'd bring a positivity to the things I did. I used to laugh about not being glass half and I was just class full because you know what, I've got opportunities that I never imagined I would ever have. So who am I not to be positive about that? And lots of people join the really big accounting firms either from school, college, university, but they join it when they're starting their careers. They gain the qualifications, they gain some experience, the lines on the CV and then they leave to go to a whole host of different sectors. You said it's a sort of gateway to anywhere. Why did you stay? What was it about either the company or you or the roles that kept you there. So I've almost left three times, including final interviews, job offers, I've gone that far. And I've always had open conversations about this isn't working for me. I wanted something to be different and each time, probably because of the scale of the firm, they've been able to go, well, why don't you try this Then, and because I love working for the firm, it wasn't the culture or the firm, it was the roles that wasn't quite working for me. I've gone, oh, okay, I'll do that. And so I always say, in many respects, against a typical accountant, I've taken quite a few risks in moving around roles, but it's not that risky because I was sitting the same firm 34 years ago. So, you know, you've got to think about that. But I think the learning there was. I was always open, I was always honest. I get really frustrated when people suddenly go, I'm handing my notes and I'm going, I'm going, why didn't we have a conversation about it? We might have been able to help. We're often asking, what is it you're looking for? Than people who want to join you? Which we'll hopefully have time to talk about. But I'm really interested to actually flip that around, especially with your focus on people. What are you not looking for? What are the things that you might see in people coming and think, do you know what? KPMG isn't the right place for them. What are the things that make you say, no? I think people who think they know it all, people who think they've got nothing else to learn. And by the way, that can happen at experienced hires, but it can also happen sometimes at those joining. You know, I'm pretty confident I know who I am on a. And it's a really interesting one because people who are very, very set in their ways, you know, almost this is who I am, accept me for who I am. And of course, the answer is, of course we want you to be who you are, but we also want you to develop as a person, develop as an individual. I need to see a willingness, people who don't have a willingness to have an open mindset about something. People who want to go and explore alternative views and perspectives that aren't their own. Yes. People who go, I've got one perspective and that's the answer no, because I think the world's complicated and if you come in and start with that mentality, you're going to struggle. I think it's one of the interesting challenges around career starters now. They're being sweepingly general here. There might have been a stronger case 20 or 30 years ago that somebody joining a company would have just expected to fit in with all the ways they do that. Whatever that company sides, you have to wear the sort of language you speak, the people you hang out with, you join Us, you fit in with us. Now there's much more of a perspective of the company needs to fit in with the person. And you often see in job descriptions, bring your authentic self, you work. Where do we get the balance right here? Because you can't have everybody turning up just saying, hey, this is me, this is how I roll. You'll have to adapt to me. Just as you wouldn't get as many people wanting to join you if you were really, really rigid in what you wanted. So how do you get this balance right of bringing people with different attitudes and different life experiences and viewpoint, but then getting them to come to the KPMG way if you want. And I don't just mean process, I mean what we like, our culture. How do you get that balance right in modern recruiting and development? I think you're right that that balance has moved. I also think no one gets it right all the time because it's. By the way, it keeps moving. You went from the great resignation not long ago to the world that we're in today where it feels a lot harder for everybody again in terms of roles and opportunities. And so for me, you've got to keep exploring that balance. So we're a very values led organization. So we're really clear what we stand for around fairness, around, around accessibility, inclusion, actually around striving for excellence in what we do. And at the same time we are very clear we want people to come as they are. To your point, because you use a huge amount of emotional energy trying to be something you're not. So helping people be themselves. But in the context of what you're doing, if you think about a client facing organization, if I said I'm a tax expert, that expertise only works in the context of the client's issue. If I just talk about what I'm an expert at, nothing might happen. So sort of same here. I'm an expert in being me, but in the context of our organizational values and it's looking at how you marry those two things together. And so if I'm a young career starter and I'm thinking of maybe different types of work, could be thinking about accountancy, but I also could be thinking about engineering or even actually I think I do want to go broadly into the areas of finance and I'm starting to look at different firms and I come to you from my first or second role, I'm untrained, what am I actually going to be doing? What are my weeks going to be filled with in my first couple of years working with you now it won't surprise me to say it depends what role you do it. And I think that's quite an important point. You don't just come into a firm like ours in one type of role. There'll be people who come into the audit side of the business to do the chart of accounting qualification who will be spending their time at clients and that might be really, really big FTSE clients that might be, you know, on a regional basis if you're out in the regions with a portfolio of clients. But you'll learn. One of the other things about accounting is not boring is it gives you a great foundation to learn from the bottom up when actually you don't really know anything. So that's part of your learning to go out and see how teams work. But we also give flexibility in that because the balance now of working in the office, working at home, working at clients is different for every client. But you also have people who join us directly on a tax route. So they're still accounting but they're going into tax. And more and more these days at KVMG we have people joining our advisory routes, doing data or cyber or technology. So the other thing is you join at a time and there's a real mix of people your age and so then you build this network. I've got friends who I joined me 34 years ago. Like, you know, we go on family holidays together now and stuff like that. So that's the other thing you do. You have like minded people going through life journeys together as well. Maybe I use that example. But the part is it's based on clients. That's the thing. Wherever you go, it's about working in teams with clients. Everything we do is in teams. I talk a lot about high performing teams and helping people be better. I spend a lot of time doing the leadership development around high performing teams. So if you're the sort of person who gets your energy from being in a team, then again you can get the benefit of that in an organization like us. Yeah, and you mentioned data there and tech and you mentioned AI earlier. How is technology, particularly AI, changing the life of chartered accountants? Because I mean, surely some of the work that was being done by accounts 10 years ago can just be done by technology now. So how are you getting the balance right between the value of human and the value of the tech? Especially in the work you do, auditing, tax matters, but also in the advice you give to clients. So I'm fascinated by this because I think we have a massive opportunity in the middle of what's going on. You're right that the way we use technology has probably changed more in the last five years than it did in the previous 25 years. I remember starting and you do the classic manual checks on everything you did, and you'd look at a sample size of 100 and it would take you three weeks. And now the data can look at 100% sample size of thousands of things and then give you the apple. So what that starts to do is get to a place where the people input is the insight and the analysis, not just the doing the work, but the other side is, I always say to people, you're going to be busy in these jobs. Yeah, we have a lot of client demands. There are times when the hours are long, which is why the flexibility is important. But for me, what technology can do is try and get the balance right between being human and the technology. Because if I can get technology doing more of the transactional work, that gives more time for the people, A, not to be working as longer hours, B, to be doing more coaching and support of each other or doing more learning for themselves. So for me, this is all about how the technology enables us to be more human together. Because a lot of people will say in our environment over the last five, 10 years, that's been really tough with the regulatory changes on the things that are done. We learn a lot from our mistakes as we go along. And obviously you do a lot now around leadership development, whether you're doing it yourself or your structure assessment and supporting people are overseeing leadership development training. I'm interested in the errors you've learned from, the mistakes you've learned from the bits that sort of you went ugh at the time, but now you look back and go, actually that really helped me move forward. What pieces along your career route do you look back and think, actually at the time it was a mistake, but in the long term, it was a huge learning opportunity. I think there's two moments that I always look back to. One, I'd only been in the firm about 18 months and I was desperate to be part of what we call Career Insight, which was the program that then brought in the next generation. Is ironic given where I've ended up. And I remember me and my friends looking at it, and a number of my friends got on the program and I didn't get selected. And I remember going to see the person who led it and she was like, I can't trust you, you know, a bit too much, you know, and therefore it's just too hard, you know, that was a real learning because I thought that energy and that activity was something everybody would love and they didn't. And therefore I always talk about being an authentic chameleon. Again, language I have today, not language I had there, which is great to be you, but you've got to sort of mold yourself to your audience. And if that person is not going to trust me, then what happens if clients don't trust me, what happens if my team don't trust me? Because what all they see is then someone called it the radio DJ type person. And it made me have to stop and think about. I have got the substance, but I'm not showing it because I quite enjoy that sort of front of house type view. And that made me really stop and think about 18 months in that. Okay, is that something I can sit with, by the way? I don't always get that right. Even now I know there's moments where people go, oh, all right, slow down. Yeah. Interestingly, roll forward and you get through various panels. I had an opportunity to move into London and I decided it wasn't right. But actually, if I'd have gone earlier, I might have had the opportunity then to come back. But I was like, no. And part of that was probably my headspace of where I grew up, how I grew up. That all felt a bit scary. And so I didn't do it. But if I gave my daughters that advice now, I probably say, well, what have you got to lose? Go and go and have a look, see what you could do. And it hasn't ultimately held me back, but you do reflect on the choices you make at different times. And then the final one was I went into our partner process and I didn't get through it. The first year I was deferred a year and I was deferred a year because they said I was too intuitive. I didn't have enough strategic thinking, strategic intent, and I didn't like that. But they were right. And I'll be honest, it took me probably three, six months to get over that and feel I'm going to leave and this is a fair and all that. But now I look back on it 20 years later and think, I wouldn't have been a partner for 20 years, probably without that feedback. It's a thought process we all go through when we're given criticism at that point in time by our seniors or by people whose decisions affect our lives. And that criticism has to make you think about what you're going to do next. But it almost sometimes feels worse when you realize that criticism is spot on and going, oh, I can't actually disagree with it. They're right, I have to do something with it. By the way, I love your description as the radio dj because I think Carl, your name as well. It's just the name for a DJ as well. I could just see that. And now as a leader, just focusing on that piece there, when you're either talking one to one or with groups or looking at how training programs run and you're thinking in particular about some of your newer joiners, those in their early twenties maybe, what advice do you give to them on the subject of leadership in the modern kpmg? If they want to know, how do I get on? How do I become the leader that works here? What would you say to them? Don't chase a role, don't know. I want to be there and there and there. Because the world doesn't work like that, actually. Keep giving yourself more breadth of experience. Keep searching and being curious. And when people obviously use that word, curious, what do I mean by curious? Just keep asking questions, keep looking for different perspectives that aren't the same as your perspective. Keep seeking out opportunities to go and try something different. Because if you do that, you will broaden your skill base and then more options will become available to you. By the way, whether you're in our firm or outside of our firm, lots of people leave our firm every year. That's natural in our world. But if we can send them into the world of work in a better place in the future, we're going to see more of these squiggly careers where people leave and come back and leave and come back. And so that's really important. So that's how I talk to people, where they'll often come and go. I'm here today and I want to be in that role in five years time. So. Well, that role might not exist in five years time. There's no point in even aiming for it. But if you build your breadth of skills and learning, and we talk about lifelong learning a lot, but you develop a mindset that goes, oh, I don't know, let me keep looking, let me keep looking, let me keep looking. And then the final thing I say to people is learning only starts at the edge of your comfort zone. If it feels uncomfortable, sit with it for longer. Because often what happens is people feel uncomfortable and they back away from it. We've mentioned clients a lot along here and perhaps the risk is we're taking for granted. Everyone knows what we mean by client. Perhaps paint Us a bit of a picture of some of the clients you've most enjoyed working with, the people and the business and the challenges that you've helped those clients overcome. Yeah, so when I started my career early in audit, that's where you're going out as part of the annual cycle, working with clients. And I was fortunate, I was in the Midlands, so I had a range of big clients, listed clients on the stock market, but I also had family owned businesses. Now in a family owned business, you're much more likely to see meet the two or three leaders of that business earlier on in your career. Whereas when you go out into a big sort of listed business, you're probably working with people similar to your peer group. So in either you're learning and you're meeting new people. If you think about what I've done over the last 20 years, it's always been in the non audit space. So actually that then is about understanding the changes, the clients going on. They might be looking to buy a business, sell a business, they might be looking to change their finance function or systems or their people systems. They may be looking to go overseas, they may be looking to change their policies around tax. You could end up doing some risk training or date. So these businesses have a number of different objectives they're trying to set and then the key, which is where the skills are the same, by the way, is to get to know the people, to understand what the people in those roles want to do, to talk beyond their titles. Don't just talk to the Chief Financial Officer as the chief Financial Officer actually. So who are they as a person? If it's Mark, well, what's Mark as a person? What's his background, what's he trying to achieve? And that's what makes clients fascinating because everyone's different. And by the way, the client you had yesterday, people might change tomorrow. Then it becomes interesting again. That's what makes it fascinating to me. I think, Carl, this has been a fascinating conversation. There is so much more I would like to dive into, but I think people are listening to this and they've been thinking, accountsy. Yeah, no, I don't know around this. We've unpicked quite a lot in a short space of time. That it is. And some of the myths. Okay, clearly accountancy is not boring. It's certainly not boring the way you do it. It is a gateway to any sector, any profession and work all over the world. You also don't have to have a degree in accountancy to start down this route. So if you're out there and think, I could or couldn't I do this? Yeah, you probably could do it. What are the things that I've taken away from this really help you perhaps succeed in accountancy rather than just get into it? You did mention people work hard in this, and I've seen that from the account that I work with. You want to succeed in this, you've got to be prepared to work hard. But it is so much about people and clients may be businesses, but it's the people you deal with in your own setup, the people you deal with in those businesses as well. So if you're really interested in people, that's going to help you out in many ways. We've used different words for the same thing. Be nosy, be interested, be curious. That's really going to help you have empathy for the problems that both your clients facing, but also people around you there and build up breadths of experiences as well. And like I think any career route, there are people in it who just get in and then fall out of it. There are people who get in it and do okay, and there are people who get in it and Excel and those things I just mentioned, there are all building blocks of succeeding in a career that offers so many possibilities. So, Carl, I think you've just brought that to life so brilliantly in such a short space of time. Thank you so much for joining us for unwrapping your own career and for opening up the world of chartered accountancy for everybody. Thank you. Thanks, Mark. I really appreciate the opportunity. Really enjoyed that. Thank you. This podcast is sponsored by We Are Futures. To find out more about We Are Futures and how we can introduce your brand, business or organization to the mass markets of tomorrow, visit www.wearefutures.com. make sure to search for careers unwrapped in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or anywhere else podcasts are found. Remember to click subscribe so you don't miss out on any future episodes. On behalf of the team here at We Are Futures, thanks for listening.