Have you ever wondered what it’s like working as a communication professional in a massive international corporation?
Then this post will be of interest to you. I spent the last 6 months working as a communications intern at one of the Big Four accounting and advisory firms, KPMG. Together with Deloitte, Ernst & Young, and PricewaterhouseCoopers, these 4 firms have the largest professional services network in the world. Collectively they audit and advise the majority of the largest publicly traded companies.
What were my tasks?
My tasks were creating the communication for the KPMG’s Learning & Development and Audit Quality departments. This entails communicating logistical things to the audit employees about their trainings, but also includes a lot of persuasive communication to brand and advertise the trainings. Learning and keeping a high audit quality standard is of high importance within KPMG, so my tasks involved communicating around that.
What was it like working at KPMG?
It was hectic, at times stressful, and hard work. But it was also exciting, the right amount of challenging, and the hard work was balanced with unwinding social activities.
Working at such a big corporation felt hectic and at times stressful because of the large number of employees and you have to deal with. In every phase of a project, you are dealing with multiple people from multiple different teams who all have their own opinions, and who are all experts in their own domain. You have to work with them to receive the right information for you to finish your tasks, but you also have to work with them for compliance reasons and because they want to be kept informed and have oversight. So it can feel hectic having to coordinate with 8 different people for one communication message, getting it this message reviewed by different people 4 or more times, and making decisions with 8 people on how the final product should look when they have different opinions. Not to mention managing their expectations and the expectations of your stakeholders throughout such projects on top of that. When you have multiple projects going on and this is the reality for every project, you can become overwhelmed and stressed. So I often found myself wondering why these were the standard ways of working. But I think that’s what you get when you work for an enormous international corporation. The level of output you are expected to deliver is also very high, so that adds to the hard work too.
Having said all of that though, if you get excited by difficult challenges, and if you like working and coordinating with people on projects then you can get energy out of work like this. I found myself being energized by the work because I liked the challenge it posed and I liked having to, for example, meet alone with some of KPMG’s partners to inform them on progress and receive feedback from them for the next phases of projects. So overall working at KPMG is a good type of stress and a motivating challenge. Also, like I said earlier the output you’re expected to deliver is very high and so you find yourself working hard, but that’s balanced with fun social activities. KPMG organizes many extracurricular activities outside of work as part of the “togetherness” of the company culture. Moreover, office wide drinks are scheduled every Friday and a large party every last Friday at the end of the month. Also, in the summer months the Friday workday ends at 15:00 to give employees a longer weekend. So, the hard work is balanced with things that let you unwind and recover. Not to mention that KPMG also pays better than most internships in the Netherlands, so the hard work is also rewarded in that way.