27 May 2011 by Owen Watson (8 comments)

Usually I’m not one for exam nerves, but I don’t mind admitting that in the final minutes ahead of my F2 exam I was feeling the pressure. So the feeling of relief when I turned over the paper and thinking 'hey, I can answer all of these questions' was amazing.

Though it did take until about 3 hours after the exam had finished before the tension had fully seeped out of my system!

15 February 2011 by Owen Watson (3 comments)

Whenever prospective CIMA students come to me for advice they usually take me down one of two paths. The ‘make or buy’ decision – which Anna kindly wrote about just a few days ago in less cryptic language (there was no coordination, honest) – and what Porter might refer to as the ‘generic strategy’ quandary.

26 July 2010 by Owen Watson (6 comments)

So, you’ve just graduated from university with your degree and you’re still donning the mortarboard in your facebook profile picture (maybe not looking quite as cool as this gentleman).

Apparently this jobs market malarkey isn’t quite what you thought it would be, who wudda thunk it?! (Using textspeak in a blog makes me cool, super cool)

14 July 2010 by Owen Watson (35 comments)

The countdown has begun. Those post-exams reflections (“I’ve done rubbish!”) have morphed into nervous tension that will soon boil over into pre-results panic.

That is if you haven’t already completely lost your head.

It all started for me about half an hour ago, I was relaxing in my front room, happy as Larry (who is that anyway?) flicking between goal.com and Facebook before I made the foolish mistake of glancing at the clock.

Massive error.

05 June 2010 by Owen Watson (15 comments)

Talking about my generation; we’re the ones who ask Y (in text-speak at least), write blogs (guilty!), and demand more from our employers...according to casual Observer’s and their closely related Guardians.

So when it comes to Management Accounting, what ramifications will these generation Yers reek on their organisations as they climb the CIMA stepladder?

18 April 2010 by Owen Watson (4 comments)

It’s been a fair few weeks since my last blog (I’m sure regular commenter’s Clifford Moggs and Adrian Rutter have missed me) , and I was pondering what I should scribble down in my latest foray when I get a phone call...

26 February 2010 by Owen Watson (5 comments) Fiscally, it hasn’t been a great week for the Premier League. A report by UEFA, the controlling body of European football, revealed that English clubs account for 56 per cent of the debt accumulated by European football clubs.

In total Premier League clubs are in the red to the tune of £3.5 billion.

24 February 2010 by Owen Watson (2 comments)

Type ‘Talent Management’ into Google and one of the things you’ll find is an array of weird and wonderful diagrams charting the component parts of what constitutes talent.

If that sentence seems a bit vague then welcome to the conundrum, what exactly is talent? Who has it? How can organisations get it and benefit from it?

31 January 2010 by Owen Watson (19 comments)

It feels like I’ve hardly been in the office this month, and when I’ve been there it has been more in mind than in spirit. More about that later...

Last week started with a trip down to London for a Kings Fund event as part of our ‘Experiential Learning’ program. Over two days, we learnt about Social Enterprise. Then we had to come up with an idea for a venture of our own and pitch it to the room.

12 January 2010 by Owen Watson (0 comments)

My original plan for this blog was to write about ‘The Business of Football’, but white stuff falling from the sky scuppered much of the fixture list this weekend and has thus forced me to change my plans.

Don’t worry, the football one is in the pipeline...or be worried, whichever you like really!

As for the snow, not sure I will be able to add too much to the inches (newspaper column, rather than powder) already deposited on the subject. But these are just some of the thoughts that came to me while I was freezing on the train going to BPP last week.

15 December 2009 by Owen Watson (3 comments)

After months of trawling around the NHS on my Orientation, I finally started my first placement at Sunderland PCT. Must admit I’d been looking forward to actually getting down to some real work after playing the role of perpetual tourist on a medical safari.

For those of you that just googled ‘Medical tourism’ – that isn’t what I was up to! (That’s next summer...)

26 November 2009 by Owen Watson (0 comments)

With my Orientation in the NHS entering its closing stages I’ve been to a variety of weird and wonderful places since my last blog. I’m still suffering the effects of giving blood last Tuesday, and I’ve only just recovered from waking up at 5am this Monday to hitch a ride on an ambulance.

01 November 2009 by Owen Watson (0 comments)

I used to sit and watch ‘The Apprentice’ thinking that I’d be the perfect candidate, the jewel in the crown of Sir Alan’s regalia. Probably something along the lines of what Howard Ebison was thinking when he applied...

Ok, maybe not...but I was definitely a stinging armchair critic.

25 October 2009 by Owen Watson (2 comments)

Feels like an age ago that I posted my last blog. In fact it was only three weeks and I've been up to all sorts in that time.

So lets get to it...

Although I'm exempt from the certificate level of CIMA, the NHS still sends us to the education days with BPP. So I spent a week in Newcastle learning the ins and outs of Financial Accounting. Despite having done a degree in Business & Financial Management and spending a year at IBM as a Finance Analyst I still managed to get my debits and credits mixed up!

Good luck to the rest of you!

04 October 2009 by Owen Watson (0 comments) Another week away in Leeds on education with the NHS this week, sandwiched between a visit to Pathology and NHS Direct.

This time we were learning what a General Management Trainee does in the NHS, and it seems to be that they manage general things...

Insightful.

I think technically they'd call it operational management, but the focus of the education was mainly on the difference between management and leadership, meshed together with some work on Myers-Briggs personality type indicators.

27 September 2009 by Owen Watson (2 comments)

Life is hectic right now...

18 September 2009 by Owen Watson (0 comments)

I was hoping to do a weekly review of my Orientation but I was too busy last week, so here's two for the price of one...The life of a CIMA student!

My week kicked off with a day in the laundry department. There were a few things that struck me about the place, one was the absolutely mind-numbing nature of the work. The process is split down into simplistic tasks and most of the washing is done by huge machines.

06 September 2009 by Owen Watson (3 comments)

“Are you CIMAsphere’s Student Blogger?” they said.

“On balance...probably yes,” I said, more in hope than expectation.

“We agree,” they said. And I was made CIMAsphere’s Student Blogger, and it was good...

Or something like that!