Larissa Feeney

The trainee is usually very open to training remotely,

If there's problems, it's generally on the trainer side.

However, what I would say is that we have certainly reduced the number of trainees that we bring on board every year.

And this year is the first year that we're actually not hiring any trainees, any trainee accountants, which is the first year ever in the history of the company.

Why is that, Louisa?

It's because, Susan, what I have learned about remote working in general, everything that we do within the company have to be intentional.

And in the past, we might have had a policy around hiring a certain number of trainee accountants on an annual basis to make sure we had a pipeline for future skilled, qualified professionals.

But whenever we sat down and looked at it and looked at the numbers and yes, there's a role of AI and yes, there's a role of remote working, we don't have to hire a certain amount on an annual basis.

We do need to hire, but not X amount and not every year.

We have the benefit, I suppose, of, because if we're talking about trainee accountants, and in my world it generally is trainee accountants, we have a three-year timeline.

So we have, so the young professionals come into us usually as graduates, sometimes as school leavers, and will train with us for three years and then qualify all going well for them.

So we have three years that we can plan.

So we can look three years ahead.

So we just have to make sure that we have enough talent in the pipeline to fill that qualified level, that newly qualified level in three years time.

So that in our case this year means that we don't have to hire because we have enough in the pipeline already.

But that's not going to be the case every year.

You mentioned there that you take on school leavers.

Both actually.

If we're talking about technical roles, you're talking about an accounting technician path.

So that would be a pathway where the student would be working sometimes four days a week and then in college on the fifth day or working full time and in college in the evening time.