Lee Holloway, Group Head of Tax, Next: A Career in Private Practice vs Industry?

Lee Holloway, Group Head of Tax at Next, shares his insight into a career in tax and how it has evolved since completing his training. After 10 years in Private Practice with KPMG and 8 years in Industry, Lee’s broad experience and extensive knowledge provides young professionals with a first-hand experience of what to expect.

Choosing a career in private practice or in industry provides food for the analytical brain as they require quite different skills as you become more senior.

Generally, individuals that are better suited to selling and like a variety of different clients are better in practice.

Those that like a broader commercial view point and enjoy implementing advice are better in industry. This is a broad generalisation obviously.

I enjoyed ten years in practice, but I wouldn’t have experienced leading a treasury function or payroll and pensions functions.

There is a danger that life in practice can be quite a sheltered existence if you’re not proactive as you’re surrounded by lots of tax people that all have similar experience, considerable technical resource and you’re not at the forefront of implementing advice.

However, you do build up key technical skills and gain knowledge through the sheer variety of client problems. Both sides of the profession are equally as important and people do move back and forth – adding key benefits and knowledge to organisations as they go.

In industry you may be part of a small team or even on your own which can be both scary or empowering. The exposure to a wider variety of people across the business makes day-to-day life a little more interesting and provides you with the opportunity to get an understanding of all areas of the business.
 

Advice to Young Tax Professionals

A number of things have definitely changed since I started out in the world of tax.

Tax departments are no longer stuffy environments that are sheltered away – they tend to be more integrated into firms and businesses.

These days whether you are in practice or industry you need to be great at networking and business partnering. You also need to have a good grasp of IT - things are getting automated!

This shifts the skills needed as professionals need to be more strategic and have the ability to handle governance rather than the data inputting of years gone by.

The concern for me is if you don’t know how to put together a tax computation how will you know your tax accounts are right? The skills learnt early in the career build the foundation for an advisory career whether in industry or practice.

Whatever your view on Tax as a career it is undoubtedly more in the spotlight externally and within boardrooms, so good people skills and communication is key. Tax requires technical and analytical ability and as its forever changing you can’t sit back.

It’s definitely been an interesting journey for me and if I could go back in time I’d still have joined the Tax profession.