Host
Jag Dhaliwal
Guests
- Oliver Sighe, Trainee Accountant, Hardwick & Morris
- Fay Bartlett, Founder, Finance & You
- Sohail Chowdhary, Director, AG Martial Arts
Episode first published: 4 December 2024
Podcast recorded: 13 November 2024
Transcript
Jag Dhaliwal: Hello and welcome to ICAEW Student Insights. My name is Jag Dhaliwal, and today we’re exploring how to bounce back from failure. It’s normal to hear about people’s successes, but less so when it comes to failure. We’re going to break open the discussion and learn why failure is simply an opportunity to come back stronger, especially when it comes to exams. To share their experiences, I’m joined by ACA student Oliver Sighe, ICAEW member Fay Bartlett, and Sohail Chowdhary, who is ACA exam qualified. Thank you all for coming in today.
Sohail Chowdhary: It’s great to be here.
Oliver Sighe: Thank you very much.
Fay Bartlett: It’s great to be here.
JD: You’ve all talked openly about failing an exam. Is it still a taboo subject as a student and in the workplace? Oliver, we’ll start with you.
OS: Yeah, so last September I failed my first three professional exams altogether. And that was quite a sad day in the office when I got the results through. I found that I had failed, and I had to then talk to my people manager, and the team had kind of read between the lines that I had failed and then I had to go through how bad the failure was. Was it bad enough to leave? And it wasn’t, thankfully. But it was, then, so what are the next steps and how would it impact? And I was scared of my job and my security, but then also that embarrassment of why did I fail? Like, it’s not good enough. But then it is okay to fail.
JD: Yeah. No, it absolutely is okay. And do you feel that people in the workplace, when that did happen to you and you had those discussions, were they comfortable having those with you or did it feel awkward in any way?
OS: I think that my general team were aware that they didn’t know how bad it was and what was going on. So for them, it was quite, as you say, a taboo subject. They didn’t want to bring it up, but they kind of knew, so it was a bit awkward interacting. Whereas with my people manager, she didn’t want to say the wrong thing. She didn’t want to say “it’ll be okay”, but she also didn’t want to say, “please leave now” or anything, because of the whole HR process and everything else. And they want to investigate and support, in their view, but in a student’s view it’s just that whole scaring, kind of, scaremongering idea of, I failed, what might happen? What’s this? What’s that? It’s that uncertainty.
JD: Yeah, I could imagine those would be the common feelings. Fay and Sohail, were those common feelings that you both had?
SC: Yeah, for definite. I mean, I still remember when I failed, right? So I was in a room full of auditors. I was actually on audit; eight other people in the room, and I got the text come through at midday. Text came through, I’d failed and somebody asked, “oh, what did you get?” And I said, “oh, I failed.” Everyone went “ooh”. And there’s just this awkward silence in the room. That was it. And then you panic. You’re like, “oh no, like, what’s going on?” Nobody wanted to speak about it because it is a taboo subject, unfortunately. And I still remember very vividly, I sat in that room very, very awkward. I went out, nobody was kind of speaking to me just because they didn’t know what to say. It was just that taboo, unfortunately. But it still exists, you know, it’s one of those subjects which you have to ... a lot of people tread lightly around, but I don’t think it should be that case.
FB: No, definitely. I think the results day is an event in the office. And it naturally then becomes like, you know, the watercooler talk or office gossip. So I remember the results day, and if you were in the office, you’d go and sit in your car or, like, go for a walk around the office, just waiting for the texts to come through. And then back then you could access the credit list as well. So people, when you were out, were looking at this list to see if your name was on it or not, and then, if it was bad news, you walk back into the office and everyone would already know that, and not really know how to react around you. You’d hide yourself away, because now you wouldn’t want other people to see your reaction. And I think, although people are talking about it more, it’s definitely something that people can open up about to just help others, because it’s a very isolating feeling, especially when you’re the only person who’s failed that particular exam in your cohort of people doing exams. You feel sort of left behind almost as other people go forward. So, yeah, 100%, it’s a taboo subject that shouldn’t be.
JD: Why do you think it’s important to share experiences of failure?
FB: I think it’s so important because it just immediately lifts the shame that you carry with you after failing an exam. I was recently on the other side of audit, speaking to the auditor, and we’re just talking about, like, where they were at with their exams, etc. And then he shared with me that he actually had failed a lot of exams in the past, so much so that he got fired from his job. So immediately I opened up about my experiences with failing exams, and immediately you can see, like, this weight lift from his shoulders. And he was, like, “oh God, yeah, this is, like, my experience, this is what I went through.” And we sort of were able to talk very openly about it in that moment. And immediately you can see sort of the stress settle, especially when his exams or the resits were around the corner for him. And I think that just goes to show how important it is just to remove any stigma immediately, just by talking about it. And hopefully this podcast itself will help so many other people just because we’re talking about it, which I just don’t think is done enough currently, especially in the workplace.
JD: Yeah, it’s definitely so powerful speaking about it. And I know, Sohail, that’s something that you have done quite openly. Do you want to share your experiences of why you think it’s important to share?
SC: Yeah, of course. I mean, for me, I just had to be really, really open. So I put out a post on LinkedIn and it did very well on LinkedIn, a lot of people saw it. They all saw the story of me failing to me picking myself up. But the reason why I put it out there was to inspire people. Now, off the back of that, I had a lot of messages come in. So I had a lot of people messaging me saying, “oh my God, you know, your story has been so inspirational”, but a lot of people were just saying “I actually failed as well”.
Now, what shocked me was how many DMs I was getting from people who actually failed. I didn’t realise it was just so common to actually fail your exams, like it’s actually a very, very common thing. But because it’s so taboo, you don’t actually know how many people are out there failing exams. That’s the way it goes. And it was amazing because this one person messaged me, said, “you know what, I’ve just failed my exam like last week. I just saw your post, right? Thank God for the LinkedIn algorithm.” It seemed to work in their favour. And he said to me, “I’ve just failed. Not sure what to do.” I messaged him then and there. I said, “look, pick yourself back up. You have you seen it from me. You can do really well in life. Go look for a job. You’ll be able to find something. You’ll be able to do whatever you want to.” Six months down the line, I get another message from him and thankfully he had found something. He’d gone to another firm, he’d sat the exam, did it, and also got a promotion at the end of it as well. And I was like, “fair enough, that’s cool.” Like for me talking about it, it’s about inspiring people and seeing people like that who fail, pick themselves back up and get to this whole other level. That’s what it’s about. So I don’t think it should be a taboo issue at all. Like, it should be something you speak about because there’s a lot more people going through it compared to what you think.
JD: And, Oliver, have you got any experiences about sharing?
OS: Yeah. So I’m part of the ICAEW Chartered Accountant Student Society of London. We are constantly finding people that have passed or failed, people that failed a few, people that have failed at different ones, different sittings. And it’s nice that I can speak to different people and share kind of what has happened to me, and they can share what’s happened to them, and almost together we can share tips. We can say, this worked for me, this didn’t work for me. We can say about what we’re doing together. We can create study sessions, we can create friendship groups, whatever, to try and study together. And that’s kind of how failure has helped me around other people because I’ve been able to talk to them, I’ve been able to give them my story, they’ve been able to share theirs with me. And it’s having someone to relate to, someone similar, so you don’t feel alone. So you don’t feel that you’re the only one.
JD: It’s really powerful when you all come together and you vocalise it, and it sounds like you all could have done with yourselves back then when you were there, and you did feel quite isolated.
SC: Yeah. I mean, like literally, I kind of wish I had you around when I’d failed my exams. But, I didn’t have anyone to talk to, so even the manager that I had at the time as well was like, there’s always this barrier, you know; she was too busy with work, I had this thing which was the biggest thing for me at the time. You know, for a lot of people, the exams mean a lot to them. For me, it cost me my job. So as soon as I found out I failed, that was it, four weeks and I was out. It was very tough like that. But when you feel like you can talk to someone like you had, that’s what makes the big difference. And I don’t feel like it’s nurtured enough.
OS: Yeah, I completely agree. Especially with the cohort, like Fay mentioned, where people are moving forward or back and people are staying where they are, and people are moving on to the next exams. Or even if people that had passed and you’ve passed, they’ll still compare, well, I got 2% more than you or something. Maybe it’s human nature, but it’s that kind of atmosphere where everyone’s so determined but at the same time, it’s not that supportive.
JD: Yeah. Well, thank you all then for coming on here and just talking about it. I think this should probably help so many listeners. So, in terms of the exam failure and the exam day, were there any ways in particular that you prepared? So, Oliver, did you feel as though maybe leading up to the exam that it would be a bad result, and did you prepare in any certain way?
OS: I thought the tax one would have gone well. I failed by 2%, so it was close. But I didn’t really have a good idea, I didn’t really want to say either way. I didn’t want to be too confident. It’s almost like everyone that asked, even your parents, would ask you, “how was it? Do you think you passed?” And it’s hard to say. On the day, I just tried to live my normal life and sort of stay calm, relaxed and not get too worked up about it. But I think naturally, I was kind of watching the clock a bit.
JD: I think that’s probably common across everyone. I think it’s difficult to know on the day how it’s going to go. I had so many I thought it was going to go one way and went another way. But, Sohail, did you, for example, with yours, know that that was going to be the outcome?
SC: I had no clue. I had absolutely no clue. So I ended up getting the results and I was sitting FAR and AA, and, as we all know, FAR, that’s the tricky one, AA is the easy one. So I looked at the results and I saw FAR 68. “Oh great, that’s amazing.” AA: “Oh no.” And then I realised, oh that’s a fail. So, you know, I had no clue at all though. Going into it I was really, really worried about FAR, and AA is the one which gets overlooked, and it was quite a common thing as well that it gets overlooked and all of a sudden you fail that one, but that’s what happened to me. I genuinely had no clue that I was going to fail the AA exam. FAR I managed to pass, but took me as a surprise.
OS: I think that’s a big part that everyone kind of says certain exams are easy, but that’s easy to them. And I think the general pathway is to do audit, so AA naturally might be easy. Whereas if you don’t do audit, I don’t work in audit, AA is not a big maths-y one but all the written and explaining and everything else is still challenging. So, like, if someone doesn’t find AA easy but they find TC easy, and then that’s okay. It’s sort of doing your own thing.
FB: Yeah. I, on the other hand, was pretty sure that it didn’t go my way on the day. So BPT, I think no matter the tuition provider you have, it’s the biggest set of course notes that you’ll probably receive for all of them. I think it’s like three inches tall. So I went into the exam with my binder because it was open book, and with the tax book as well. I actually dropped the book on the floor and the binder opened and the pages went everywhere. So yeah, that was like me. I was like, yeah, surrender. I give up now. But I knew then going in the second time around that I needed to refine my notes, like I needed to have like a summarised booklet of only a few pages, that I knew where everything was, could streamline everything and not rely on it so much. I had a lot of self-doubt with like, oh, I know that, but do I know that? Like, let’s look at the book to just confirm that I know that for the sake of doing the exam. But I needed to, like, have the self-confidence that I knew the answer. And even if it was slightly wrong, you still get marks, you pick up them on the way. So yeah, that was definitely a tactic I took in for the second time, but knowing I failed was, yeah, I mean, it was a given.
JD: So it sounds like you did then take something away between the first and the second, and you kind of learnt how to go about things differently. Were there any other strategies that you used that you hadn’t in kind of the first that you then built into the second?
FB: Yeah, definitely. So, specifically, the use of the question bank. When I did questions and did them to time and everything, obviously your goal is to do all of them in the question bank. You then turn to the answers and the answers, it’s really sometimes quite difficult to understand the core of what the question was actually asking for. So when I got it wrong, I didn’t know how I got it wrong. And I was doing a lot of my exams during COVID lockdown, so I was really isolated. I didn’t have anyone immediately there to ask questions for. The tuition provider I was with at the time was also self-taught, so there wasn’t a tutor immediately there. Like, you could send an email, but you’d have to wait for the next day for them to come back to you. And I just didn’t think to ask for help after doing a question or just going to my peers that I knew that were also sitting that exam and just say, “look, I didn’t understand this question, have you looked at that yet? Like, do you mind working through it together?”
In hindsight, that just feels obvious, but at the time, I couldn’t help but feel like frustrated with myself that I didn’t understand and I didn’t know the answer. And I felt a bit embarrassed and ashamed to actually go to a friend to be like, “I don’t understand this. I don’t know why I’m not understanding this,” and just seek support that way. I think I isolated myself in revision a lot, and then took it out on myself when I didn’t understand something. So, fortunately enough, the firm that I moved to, the smaller one, they had in-classroom learning, which is one of the reasons why I decided to join because that’s just the way I learn stuff the best. I couldn’t really focus that well, when it was sort of the self-taught stuff and it was just a video of like a tutor highlighting the pages as you had to read it with them. I can’t take in information like that. So just understanding how I learn information and also asking for help and being fortunate enough that help was there when I needed it, that was huge in doing the resits.
JD: Yeah, you’ve definitely learnt a lot between the first and the second. And I, too, am probably an in-person class person. So, Sohail, were there any strategies that you adopted?
SC: Yeah. I mean, I came across this little technique called time boxing. So if anyone who doesn’t know time boxing, you sit down, you literally just allocate set amounts of times, you split the subjects up and just really hammer in depending on the time. So if it’s one hour spent on something to do with BPT, then great. Don’t like go over that at all. That works really, really well for me. But I think every single person, you’re book smart enough, I think just focus, try and find something which works for yourself. There’s loads of other things like the Pomodoro technique and all sorts, there’s so many revision tips out there. Find whatever works for you. Don’t think it’s the end of the line.
JD: Oliver, did you find you had to change your technique and find what worked for you?
OS: I’m very bad at feeling guilty for not studying and for sort of aiming and saying, like, “I’m going to do four hours on this day” and it not happening, and then I start feeling like I should have done that. Why don’t I do that? And sort of beat myself up. So what I’ve started to do for the future exams, which is working well, is to try and recognise every half an hour or hour that I have available and just utilise it. So whether it’s like half an hour at lunch break, I can do like a question at the question bank or I can do something else or study something. It’s splitting things down and looking at the smaller topics. So, for TC, for example, I might look at national insurance in the mornings because it’s small, whereas I might look at something bigger after work. I think for me, it’s that kind of time boxing that you mentioned.
JD: Yeah, sort of splitting things up.
OS: Yeah, making it kind of feasible and tangible and actually realistic, so that I can prove what I’ve done. I can say I’ve done it, and it’s actually likely to happen. So I’m sort of making use of small amounts of time rather than just aiming for the big weekends and they sort of disappear within life of admin and whatever.
JD: Yeah. Agreed. I think you do just need to find time when you can and just make the most of it. Do you have any tips for how you think students can go about building their resilience?
OS: Yeah, I think for me it’s sort of remembering what your end goal is. Once you’ve passed all your exams, you’ll be a chartered accountant, and that is a massive accolade. And it has all the sort of monetary rewards, it has all the life rewards, opportunities. You can go into different avenues of career, create your own firm like Fay has. There’s so many different things you can do with it. And I think, although you might fail one or two, whatever it might be, keep going and you will get there. And once you’re there, it would be really worth your while. No one can ever take that away from you.
JD: Fay, anything from yourself?
FB: I think the big thing is knowing that resilience does not equal speed or the fastest you can get there. I think it’s about how you grow and progress on the journey rather than the finish line itself. And just taking time to reassess where you are, how you feel, to move forward from there. Don’t just, like, bury your head in the sand and just try and plough like straight, full steam ahead, because you’ll hurt yourself, literally and figuratively. But I think it’s just really important to sort of reaffirm who you are, what you’re doing, and that you can do this. Don’t let the outside voices or the inside voice get you down, because that does crop up sometimes. And yeah, like you got this, you know you do. And just keep going.
JD: So something we haven’t touched on too much yet that I want to explore a bit more is how you actually initially bounced back. So, from that result, and you’ve all mentioned kind of the feelings behind that, how did you then actually pick yourself up to carry on?
FB: Well, for one, I just wanted to hide myself away for a bit and really sort of let it sink in and think about next steps. Like, after results day, especially because they’re on a Friday, there’s always like a work social at the end of the day to like, you know, join your colleagues. I avoided that. I just wanted to go home, like, stroke my cat and then just chill out for a bit and just let it sink in and sort of think about what I needed. For me, I knew I needed time to sort of reassess this, particularly with my CR fail. It actually took me a whole year to resit it again. I booked the exam to resit after six months, as in the soonest opportunity you could get. But then I was like, no, it’s not been long enough yet. I just needed some more time to actually just calm down. But I think just having that support system in place and talking to a friend or family about how I was feeling and them reassuring me that it wasn’t the end of the world because it feels like that in the moment. Just knowing that, like, we are so resilient after coming out of all of this because we just pick ourselves up and we just keep going until we get to the end, and then the world is your oyster, and it’s just reminding yourself of that, of what the qualification, like, gives you. And if it was easy, everyone would do it. Which is why it’s still so cool to say that, yeah, I know I’m an ACA Chartered Accountant, because it is such an achievement that you just should be proud of yourself, even if you’re not at the end yet. Just look at where you’ve come and what you’ve learnt. And just, yeah, just reminding yourself of that every now and then just to keep going.
JD: I really admire that you do just listen to yourself. You put your mental health first. You take the time that you need and, yeah, you recognise your achievements. You need to be kind to yourself and absolutely agree, if it was easy, everyone would probably do it. So if there’s one last bit of advice then that you can all give to our students listening to take away, what would it be? Oliver?
OS: I think for me it would be to prioritise your mental health. Make time to study, but also make time to have your life. It’s to use available hours in the day or little breaks you might have in between certain things. I would really recommend sort of sports or theatre or whatever you’re into, just a way of sort of letting off a bit of steam and getting a bit of alone time or with friends. Just make sure that you are focusing on yourself as well as the exam, because it can be very all encompassing being in the office late at night or spending all weekend, or rushing through question banks and watching videos and things. It can be quite isolating sat at your desk. And even more so if you work from home because you’re in that desk all day working, and then you’re at the desk all evening studying.
SC: So, for me, it’s as simple as just don’t give up. You know, I had all the odds against me, literally all the odds against me, and I still managed push through it. And there’s this quote, which is that, you know, for indeed, “with hardship comes ease.” And I strongly, strongly believe in that. Yes, you may have failed an exam, but later on down the line it will get easier and easier. Had I have given up at that point really, really early on when I ended up failing, all the amazing things would not have happened afterwards. Like it may seem like the worst thing in the world then and there in that moment, but the reality is there’s so many more amazing things coming your way. So for me, just don’t give up.
FB: I mean, touch on what both of you said. It’s just to keep going. Think about yourself. You are your own priority. And don’t expect other people to make you a priority, because that’s not their responsibility. But look at how far you’ve come, like, celebrate the small wins, if that’s one exam pass, like a mock exam that you thought went really well or like even just a full-on hard week of revision, just give yourself a little time to take care of yourself and celebrate the small wins and just know that you are not alone. There are hundreds of other people doing exactly what you’re doing at any one time, and I’m sure that the ICAEW has many sort of resources and support. You can reach out to your colleagues and just have those support systems in place for when you need them. And yeah, just take things at your own pace. It’s not a race. You don’t need to qualify as soon as possible, just take things at your own pace and in your own time, and yeah, you will get there.
JD: That’s all great pieces of advice, and I’m sure our listeners will agree. Before we finish up, I want to say thank you again to you all for coming in today. Oliver, Fay, Sohail, thank you for your time.
SC/OS/FB: It’s been a pleasure.
JD: Make sure you visit ICAEW Student Insights for ongoing support during your studies with ICAEW. That’s available at icaew.com/studentinsights. Finally, remember to subscribe to ICAEW Student Insights wherever you get podcasts so that you never miss an episode. Thanks for joining us today. Bye for now.