#nzica

[robwilber1980]

Slater Chartered Accountants, members Chartered Accountants Australia New Zealand, professional body. Slaters works to highest standards, ethics of profession.

[robwilber1980]

Slater Chartered Accountants, members Chartered Accountants Australia New Zealand, professional body. Slaters works to highest standards, ethics of profession.

[robwilber1980]

Slater Chartered Accountants, members Chartered Accountants Australia New Zealand, professional body. Slaters works to highest standards, ethics of profession.

[gradextrasatdeloittenz-blog]

A summer intern's reflections on the NZICA Student Challenge - a whale of a time

Finding out that my friend Charles (second from left in photo above) and I (far left) were judged runner-up in the NZ Institute of Chartered Accountants (NZICA) student challenge was a great surprise - that link takes you through to our entry.

Then discovering that the winners were Lynda Low and Sheryn Becker (second from right and far right in the top photo), proved that young Deloitte employees are showing innovation and exceeding expectations outside of work too!  Deloitte’s signals, particularly ‘play to win’ were obviously making an impact.

Part of the competition prize was to meet with Whale Watch Kaikoura (WWK), the focus of the competition, to learn about their business and future plans.  We flew to Christchurch where CFO Barry Botherway welcomed and drove us up to Kaikoura, the company’s base, right on the waterfront.

That afternoon we went on one of their Whale watching trips.  All, except for one, were seasick and started filling their bags... in fact they had about 3 staff continuously walking down the boat collecting bags.  However after what seemed like endless moving following the radar signals we had a whale sighting, and experienced the “fluke up, fluke down.”

We returned to our apartments, allowed our stomachs to rest and prepared for dinner with WWK staff.  It was a very relaxing atmosphere where we joked about how to handle the rough sea weather, talked about their company, their vision and the extensive community involvement.  WWK is well known for their feature on BNZ’s TV ad – and instead of taking any money for it they asked BNZ to facilitate education programmes in Kaikoura to benefit the community. 

The next day we were taken to their peninsula estate, the land they would use for any future developments and we were shown some of the designs for the proposed visitors centre, the topic of our presentations. 

A few weeks later we were recognised as ‘Young Leaders’ at the annual NZICA Leadership Awards – it was a great honour to be there with guest speaker Hon Peter Dunne and to see such a thriving professional body (NZICA), which I endeavour to become qualified with.

My friend and I won vouchers to use at Flight Centre and both Lynda and Sheryn are currently on a business trip to the UK, which is the main part of their first prize.

Cheers, Craig