Hi Alex, what would you say is the most important skillset for specifically working in the transaction diligence team?

Hey Tom, thanks for your question! As you can probably imagine, it is quite difficult to say for sure that one particular skill is the most important one, so I've tried to narrow it down to three skillsets that I think are really important (and obviously, these are not the only ones!).

The most obvious skillset that is crucial to succeeding in TD is your technical skills, most importantly being able to work with numbers. We spend a lot of time working in excel and delving deep into a firm's financials, hence having good analytical, numerical and problem-solving skills is key. Being a grad in TD, I have to study for the chartered accountancy qualification alongside working, which is also heavily numerical. Under technical skills I would also include things like using excel and potentially data analytics programmes, as we use these all the time.

Secondly, I think such an important skill to have is business acumen. The technical skills I've mentioned above are important for any type of role in accountancy and finance, but for TD specifically you need a business mindset to actually apply these technical skills. It's all well and good being able to understand complicated financial information, but without understanding the business context it becomes hard to make observations and draw insightful conclusions. We have to understand the way a business works and why, and identify potential problems - or opportunities - to our clients. Having a strong understanding of businesses, markets and economics more broadly is therefore key to our understanding of why we do the work we do.

Finally, I've gone with initiative & enthusiasm - I'm kind of cheating with a two in one here but they are both so closely related! In TD, you don't turn up every day at 9, sit down, do your daily tasks, then clock out at 5. Projects run for a finite period of time, and the workload fluctuates across the project life cycle. There are times when you might not be on a project and have nothing to do, or you'll be on multiple projects with everything to do - it really can vary. So being able to take the initiative is so important. This could be reaching out to others on your team when you're quiet to see if you can help on anything, or explaining to your team that you have too much to do and need some help with something. It's being given a task for the first time having never done it before, and taking a good stab at it before you ask for help - but it's also asking for help when you need it rather than struggling for hours. It's asking at the start of a project if you can work on a specific area of the report that you haven't done before, or if someone can coach you through it. TD has a lot of depth and so there is a lot of learning to do, and you have to take the initiative for your own learning. This is so important because if you do this, you'll progress so much more quickly and easily, and you'll build a good reputation with those you work with. Being enthusiastic and really trying to get involved wherever you can is how you get the most out of being in TD.

There are so many other important skills like your interpersonal, teamworking, organisational, coaching etc. but I've definitely gone on way too long already with those three...

I hope this helped! - and if you really must narrow it down to just one, I think business acumen is the one I'd put at the top of my list :)