Learnings For a CA Student During Articleship Period

Articleship is a part of the CA curriculum just to teach CA Students how the corporate world or the finance world works. Articleship period is the golden period for a CA Student career to learn and gain. How you go through it will have an impact on your career prosperity and satisfaction. Taking your Articleship period too seriously or too lightly will have an adverse impact on your training and your overall learning experience.

Based on the size of the firm and types of the audit available with the employer firm, a student undergoes extraordinary learning in to the various professional skills. They are expected to learn certain things down deep in this formative period of their career. Here we are discussing on the conventional things and some basic points that every Article (CA Student) should learn and gain during their Articleship period.

• Practical Knowledge

you should understand the practical knowledge about areas your firm is operating in. Basically the chosen firm will provide you with the knowledge of some of the fields in which Chartered Accountants works.  As a Chartered Accountant you must first learn all the basics of all types of work, when you become aware about basics then you should try to develop core competence which will be helpful when you find jobs or do practice.

READ Too: How To Apply Articleship In Big 4?

• Audit

It’s highly likely that in the first week your Articleship, you’ll be sent out for the first phase of an audit called Vouching. Understand and learn the working knowledge of Standards of Audit, and getting to know the History of Accounting errors and system problems. This will help in understanding and handling the client very well and how things are done in the real life, in parallel practical knowledge of audit will support you in understanding the subjects practically.

• Accounting

Simple data entry of client’s can help you understand basic accounting concepts better. By doing this, you would be hands on to the two basic accounting software – Tally and Busy. Both software tools are powerful in terms of reporting facilities and also assist in business management. This will help to develop managerial and reporting capabilities useful in the long run.

• Office Ethics

You should learn how people operate in office i.e. about the office culture, how people dress, talk, meet and greet colleagues, seniors and clients. It is very important to observe how people form groups, how they make their juniors to work and seniors to help/guide, keeping good relations with administrative staff i.e. HR, Clerks, etc.

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• Email Drafting

This is the most important part indeed of articleship period. Now, in business world, everything today goes on Email. Writing a good email, is an art as don’t have a tone or smileys (means they are not used). It is very important to learn how to write business , client interaction, Requirement understanding kinds of emails. The fact is we never get opportunity to learn this anywhere else. This is a good ground to learn. Initially you can see how your boss writes email, how your senior does it. Then you can innovate it yourself.

• Communication Skills

This is again a great area to learn. An average CA with good communication skills will fare much better than the topper with poor communication. It very necessary to learn how to interact with clients, colleague and others. The interaction can be face to face, or telephonic or over internet services like video call, skype, etc. A conversation over telephone, has to be polite and discussing documents over telephone is an art. Similarly communication over Skype is also an interesting thing to learn, one should know how to have business conversations over Skype and how to share documents, discuss & present over it.

• Dealing with the Babu / Government Offices

Your articleship training is not complete until you’ve witnessed the reality of a government office. After experiencing the government office working system and environment, your biggest learning will make you a tougher and more confident person. That constant running around will also force you to understand the system and deal with it in a better way. Knowing what to do and how to do it is the main learning point.

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• Balance Work and Personal Life

Learn when to relax and balance your work and personal life. Some people are unable to cope up with too much work load and study pressure at the same time. During your professional life you may be asked to go over and above your capacity you should know where to draw the line and what is acceptable at times and ease yourself.

Young Indian professionals are the most stressed out lot in the world. Their ambition of money takes a toll on their health, and leads to restlessness, depression, heart problems and many more. So, learning this important point to relax when you should, during your articleship period, will complete your experience of becoming a successful CA.

The hunger for more knowledge is good for a CA Student. It is a very good idea to know what others have learnt and re-assess oneself on the basis of same, so that you become equally competent. This is a good way of improving oneself. These are some of the major points to be learnt during Articleship period. We may have missed out on a few less important ones as it is these major points that form the core of your learning experience. We would love to hear from you regarding what all you learnt during your CA Articleship period on AfterGraduation forum.