Carly Maguire: Accounts Officer

My name is Carly McGuire, I'm an Accounts Officer for the House of Commons in the Finance Performance and Portfolio team, and I'm based here in Westminster.

I am doing the AAT level four diploma in Accounting, which is the professional level. I've always been interested in business in general anyway, but the more I looked into the aspects of a business, and what's most important, accounting is always the common denominator of a business.

My main responsibility in my role would be to record and reconcile all of the income that is received into the House of Commons’ bank account.

My typical day, I would start off by reading any emails that needed to be chased up on then I would download all of the payments that have come into the bank account and make sure that it's all recorded and processed.

For this apprenticeship, I found out by the Parliament job opportunities website, it gives you opportunities for both the Houses of Commons and Lords.

The apprenticeships I was looking for, they were quite generic, so this one was an actual role with real responsibility, but studying at the same time, and also in a place like this, it's just amazing.

For me, it was one or two options, either uni straight after school or an apprenticeship, the more I thought about going to uni, I probably wouldn't have concentrated as much as I thought I would be, and I'm also going to have to pay it off at some point in my career.

With the apprenticeship, it's studying and working at the same time, so getting your experience at the same time, there's more chance of you getting a job straight after your apprenticeship than you getting out of uni straight away.

My course specifically is distance learning, so my training provider is based up in Birmingham, and then I do my classes and all my revision online.

My advice for students, I would say that organisation is the top, top tip I think, especially if you're thinking of studying a higher level, there's a lot more concentration needed and a lot more studying, revision to be done.

My advice to parents, there's great benefits to it. You get more experience by doing your studies alongside.

Doing the apprenticeship now, when you're working alongside your studies, you can adapt your studies to your tasks that you do every day, and you can always pass your exams better with higher marks when you're practising it every day.

If you're covering areas in your studies that you don't do in your role, you can also shadow other people and what they do as well, so you want to get the best and the most out of it as possible.

Working in Parliament is amazing, you get to see all kinds of different culture and history around your workplace.

I've also been in the chambers while I've been here as well which is amazing. It's always great working somewhere where you enjoy the surroundings.