Hi Neil,

welcome to the forum.

great to hear that you still find the subject matter fascinating after doing your initial studies. So many drop out at this stage as some take to double entry and some never really feel comfortable with it.

You've hit the age old problem related to qualifications and experience in that so many pass the exams but even in the few instances where the CV's get to the eye's of the right person the lack of experience end's up seeing your resume filed in the great round under desk filing cabinet.

For this reason many who would dearly love to work in finance departments or in practice end up working as self employed bookkeepers. This can be quite dangerous, espechially in the early stages, when people come to it with no practical experience. However, for the most part they battle through and many now have quite successful businesses.

If you want to progress it might be worth thinking about taking the AAT qualification. This is the one that most employers (and agencies) look for so without it you would already be at a disadvantage over those who have that but no experience. Unfortunately however, in the pecking order of job hopefuls experience always wins out over qualifications with the ideal candidates having both.

So, working on the gaining experience side, gaining experience matching and batching might suck your enthusiasm for bookkeeping right out of you. However, a month or so in a SAGE or SAP environment doing repetative tasks (with occassional interesting scenario's) may be a good start and who knows what other interesting opportunities such may open up.

Rather than apply for permanent roles only have you thought of temping? You would be surprised at how much experience can be picked up by doing a month here, two weeks there.

Also, think about credit control as a possible way forwards as besides people skills there is often a strong element of financial skill in tracking payments through the system and taking client accounts back to inception and rebuilding. Personally I quite enjoy this sort of work but some don't like the negotiating side of it.

Good luck in the job hunt. This really is a particulary difficult time to move into this field as so many are turning to bookkeeping on the back of reduncancy. However, percevere. Try to build freindly relationships with contacts with your local major suppliers of bookkeeping staff such as Reed. They get emails from hundreds of hopefuls every day so make sure that you phone them and make an appointment to go in an d register personally.

If an agency doesn't feel right to you then they're probably not right for you. Personally my favorite is RK accountancy but your experience of recruiters will be different from mine. Just make sure that you register personally, (not via email!) with quite a few and you will soon find which ones are working hartd to find you a job and which one's are not. But even for those one's, as Sun Tsu said, "Don't burn your bridges".

Anyway, good luck with your studies and gaining work experience Neil. Unfortunately, as you'll find in the coming months, luck does play an awfully large part in this.

kind regards,

Shaun.