When Eryn Paterson CA, Audit Assistant Manager at KPMG, heads into secondary schools to speak, she often starts by having the teachers ask the students what a typical chartered accountant looks like. “Male, old and briefcase,” are the words that usually come up, she laughs. So when Paterson then enters the room, young, female and stylish to boot, it immediately becomes clear she is anything but stereotypical. When she shares her personal story of progressing into and through the profession, that becomes all the more apparent.

In Scotland alone, only 36% of people working in professional fields come from working-class backgrounds, with chartered accountancy being no exception. But Paterson was born in the East End of Glasgow and at the age of five was taken in to live with her grandmother permanently. It was an incredible act of love and selflessness without which, as Paterson said during her speech at the ICAS Admission Ceremony 2024, “I wouldn’t be standing where I am today.”

This was the ceremony’s keynote address, and delivering it was an experience so surreal, says Paterson, “I still can’t quite believe that I did it.” But if the act of sharing her story to an audience of 1,000 people was a surprising situation to be in, the response afterwards, “blew me away. People were coming up and hugging me and saying they had been crying as I was talking,” she says. “Even when we were leaving the venue, people in the street approached me. It was quite overwhelming.”

Paterson’s speech, which spoke about the need for greater social mobility in chartered accountancy, arguably struck such a chord as it demonstrated in the clearest possible terms just how closely our personal and professional lives are entwined. And most importantly, how it takes genuine effort and dedication from those in positions of power to ensure one doesn’t act as a barrier to the other.

In Paterson’s case, while the most unequivocal act of support came from her grandmother, other smaller, but nonetheless significant, ones followed, the first being her business and accounting teacher. “He was a really, really good teacher and that alone had a big impact,” she says. He noticed her aptitude for numbers and encouraged her to pursue this subject into further education.

“For someone from a lower socio-economic background, three Bs might be equivalent to someone from a private school’s four As, if you think about the schools they went to, the support they’ve had or the resources available to them”

Then came her school careers adviser who made her aware of the ICAS Foundation. Paterson was successfully enrolled into the programme and supported throughout her accounting degree at the University of Glasgow, from where she graduated with a first in 2020.

The financial grant the foundation provided was of course an incredible aid to Paterson, but the mentoring scheme that came alongside it was invaluable in a way she would have struggled to envisage beforehand. “I was the first in my family to go to university, but when I had any questions, whether about university itself or applying for jobs, or about the Big Four or smaller firms, I could go to my mentor,” she says. “She was a CA in practice so she could actually answer these questions, or she knew somebody who could. Having a touch point in that field was incredible.”

This included advice around internships, of which Paterson did two: the first in audit and accounts at Consilium Chartered Accountants and the second in finance at ICAS. “It gave me a little taste of working both in practice and then across the different business areas in ICAS, which then helped me narrow down areas I wanted to target when it came to applying for graduate roles,” she says.

Setting her sights on doing her CA training at KPMG, which she had learnt was a “great firm”, Paterson joined in 2020 and was promoted to her current role of Audit Assistant Manager last year. Broadly, she says, it is her responsibility to oversee the day-to-day running of the audit team, “communicating to my manager, director or partner above and escalating any issues if need be, as well as coaching and making sure the junior team are set up with their work for the day”.

The importance of these softer skills – coaching, communicating etc – were a big part of her CA training, says Paterson, and she was struck by how on a par they sat with the more technical side of things. “They both come hand in hand,” she says. “You absolutely have to be able to work well with others if you want to be a good CA.”

Opportunity for all

Paterson’s next goal, she says, is to reach managerial level, but her ambitions are far from limited to her own success. She is determined to ensure that more people like herself – with the talent and ability but without the socio-economic circumstances to propel them forward – are afforded opportunities in the profession. “When I qualified it meant I was able to become a mentor with the ICAS Foundation,” she says, “so it just feels like I’ve come full circle, from being supported by the foundation to now being able to go on and offer that support to someone else.”

One of the principal messages she hammers home to her mentees today, she says, is to take opportunities when they’re presented to you, particularly when it comes to networking. “When I was at university I was invited to an ICAS dinner as a guest of the foundation, and at that age I was probably a bit unsure what it was all about, but I went along and was sitting next to a partner from a small accountants in Glasgow,” she says. “He advised I pass my details on to his firm, which was how I secured that first internship [at Consilium]. You just never know where things will lead.”

Alongside her mentoring, Paterson is one of the original members of KPMG’s social mobility network, and today speaks with evident (and deserved) pride about what they’ve achieved to date. This includes reporting on the socio-economic pay gaps in their firm and launching a programme to help support colleagues from less privileged backgrounds progress at a comparable rate to their peers. “It started as just a few of us in Scotland together and then that set-up was replicated throughout the UK,” she says. “The scale that it’s grown at has been massive.”

Massive, however, is exactly how you might describe the scale of the problem at hand, with social mobility at an all-time low in the UK and barriers to professional roles starting at the most foundational levels. “I don’t know if it’s as bad now as historically, but the Big Four firms do tend to recruit from the better universities, so if someone didn’t get the grades to get into one of these, then obviously that has an effect on what graduate roles they secure,” says Paterson.

“But someone from a lower socio-economic background, their three Bs might be almost equivalent to someone from a private school’s four As, if you think about the individual circumstances, the schools they went to, the support they’ve had or what resources were actually available to them.” Efforts to combat this don’t stop with the firms themselves, she adds: “It has to go across the whole piece.”

And if Paterson ever needed help convincing that change could happen, she was sure to find it at One Young World, the four-day conference that brings together 2,000 delegates from more than 190 countries, with the aim of developing young leaders to build a fair and sustainable future for all. Paterson was selected to represent ICAS at this year’s summit, which was held in Montreal, an experience that she said was incredibly emotional at times.

“One of the moments that really stuck with me was a panel discussion between BMW and a headmistress from a school in South Africa that the company had sponsored,” says Paterson. “With the BMW support, the headmistress was able to provide a good learning environment, food, water and shelter, and when they played videos of the children there you could just see how much of an impact this headmistress had had on the kids’ lives. That was the one that got me the most.”

But if individual talks were inspirational in themselves, Paterson seems equally as awestruck by the sense of commonality she felt with thousands of fellow delegates. “There were 195 countries represented, so there really was a wide mix of people from all different backgrounds, but you don’t realise how similar you all are, in a way,” she says. “There was a flag ceremony on the last day, a display of how, even though we’re from all these different places, we all want to make a difference. Having all those people in one place who have that in common was just really powerful.”

For all that Paterson has achieved already, she remains strikingly grounded, still now showing genuine surprise at the response her keynote speech elicited. “You don’t actually realise how much of an impact you can have on other people’s lives,” she says. Given her journey, her obvious talent and her absolute determination to give back, there can be little doubt that this impact has only just begun.

oneyoungworld.com

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