Pamela Chang: Siemens finance graduate scheme

Pamela ChangRole: Contracts in PFIs
Location: United Kingdom
Career highlights: major projects and contracts

Pamela graduated from the University of Nottingham with a BA Honours degree in Industrial Economics.

She is studying CIMA and is on the Siemens finance graduate scheme, in the healthcare division. Her first year placement was in the corporate division.

 

A week in her life
Pamela works in the PFI (private finance initiative) finance team, which oversee multimillion pound contracts for equipment management and service in hospitals around the UK.

'I have responsibilities related to both the financial close process as well as daily operations at a project level. I start my day by downloading the latest project results, then I will spend the morning analysing the maintenance costs to ensure they are correctly posted to our project and assigned into the right category, and add the new or renewed contracts to our maintenance schedule.

'In the afternoon, I start to transfer the remaining costs assigned to the project cost centre and create the journal entry that will be posted in the system to reassign them to the appropriate work breakdown structure. I check the expenses that have gone through to ensure they have been allocated to the correct project.'

Weekly team meetings are an important part of Pamela's work.

'Our manager updates us on general information, weekly tasks, key dates and deadlines and we receive feedback from other meetings. These meetings are very useful as they keep us up to date with how the rest of the team are doing and it give us the opportunity to discuss any key issues that may have arisen during the week.'

Pamela's work on contracts is a major responsibility. 

'I update our project model by adding new pieces of equipment required for the hospital. The PFI contract in place is extremely long and needs to be updated when more equipment is required. I open up the different files containing the equipment descriptions, prices, warranty years and various other details that I then transfer over to the worksheet used for the model.