Meet our team

“I work in Digital as a Digital Marketing Executive. I joined just before lockdown and managed to have the initial induction in HQ, so it’s been an interesting time all in all, getting to know everyone and adjusting to working from home for now. It’s been incredibly busy and amazingly smooth – a real opportunity to learn and do things in a different way, but ICAS gives you that freedom. The way I work has totally changed. Our CEO has been brilliant and has epitomised everything that’s positive about how ICAS works, with lots of communication and discussions – we’re doing really, really well in terms of culture and how accepting people are. We’re very open to change and in Digital Marketing we test and learn all the time. It’s a supportive culture that feels like family.”

“I joined ICAS four years ago as Partnerships Manager, and from my personal experience our culture has changed in a really positive way. I feel it’s very supportive and it’s made my job easier to do, especially since coming back from maternity leave in April. I think my team works closer and seems to gel better, and I can see even more positive changes since I came back across the whole organisation – the communication is really good. I’d like to do some office meetings and meetings with our current and prospective commercial partners, which my role usually involves, but we’re all adapting to online pretty well. If any of my friends were interested in a role here, I’d definitely say go for it.”

“I’m the Operations and Engagement Manager for the ICAS Foundation, one of ICAS's registered charities. We support talented university students from disadvantaged communities, who are studying accounting and finance at university, by providing financial and mentoring assistance throughout their degree. The Foundation is supported by member donations and partner support, and it’s great to see our students go on to succeed in their chosen careers after university. We work closely with teams across ICAS to promote and develop our programmes, and have a supportive and dedicated Board of Trustees to help direct our work. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, ICAS has been supporting all staff members to help us keep working, and ensuring we can provide even greater support to our students during these challenging times. Working for the ICAS Foundation is such a rewarding experience."

“After a 30 year career at PWC, I was familiar with ICAS as I’d been on Council and Policy boards. Three months into “trial retirement” I was approached by ICAS to take on a policy role.  One thing led to another and I took over as Chief Executive in 2017. I came in with a new strategic direction – in particular how can we use digital to modernise/enhance our performance and presence. That came into its own when lockdown hit – we knew the possibilities, we rapidly deployed a plan, when we’ve hit hurdles it hasn’t been a surprise and we’ve dealt with it. I’m really proud of the team and what they have achieved and there is more to come. I think the role of CEO is to unblock pathways,  we have some very talented people across the organisation at all levels – we look for people who have the ability to come and share that ability with us.”

“I joined ICAS as Director of Transformation six years ago – I’m now Executive Director of Customer Experience – coming from a background in engineering and latterly web operations. I have had a varied and exciting career, including here at ICAS. Having come from a large scale American corporate it was exciting to be able see and touch every part of ICAS and help facilitate change. We built a strong team, merging experience with new talent and developed a new way of thinking as part of our transformation programme – the collaboration and innovation across the whole organisation has been amazing. Everyone is willing to get things done. It’s empowering and challenging - I absolutely love my job!”

“I work in the Learning Centre at ICAS. I’m a tax and accountancy tutor and look after some of the tax courses as well. I qualified as a CA 20-odd years ago as an auditor and came to work for ICAS for a few years. I left and went back into practice and worked in corporate tax, first with Deloitte and then EY. I also studied for the CTA tax qualification. I was involved with running internal courses for tax training while I was with EY and then moved into accountancy education with BPP. At BPP I taught courses for the ACCA. CIMA, ATT and CIOT qualifications and gained a good understanding of each of the different qualifications. I’ve been back with ICAS for nine years. ICAS is a very warm and welcoming environment. It certainly has become a lot more collaborative over the lockdown and the move to online has worked really well, which is great. We do a lot of project work in the learning department and that often involves working with different departments as well.”

“After 19 years in one company, I decided I need a change. I was careful about where I wanted to go – I wanted a company that would support me and ICAS seemed a good choice. I’m a Customer Champion – I was in service roles in my last company – so it was a natural move as I like it when no two days are the same. Certainly not now, as we went to working from home almost as soon as I joined, so my training has taken a different path – but a good one. There has been loads of contact and video calls, and we all have numbers to call if we need anything. Our role is to answer queries from students and help them with the move to online learning and exams. We can go to anyone in ICAS to get answers and everyone is so helpful – it’s a friendly and social culture. It’s a good company to work for.”

“I am the Senior Events Manager at ICAS and my job is to put on a fantastic events programme for our Members and our Students. I've worked in the events industry for around 15 years, mostly in professional services in London and Edinburgh. Whilst freelancing for EY a colleague mentioned a job at ICAS in Events team based in Edinburgh -  I’ve now been at ICAS for five years.

Due to COVID we are no longer doing face-to-face events.  However – we managed to make this a positive and quickly turnaround a brilliant webinar offering for our Members. We now organise around ten webinars a month, which is incredible to think before April we had never run a webinar before.

We've totally improved how accessible our events and content are for our Members. This is due to how well we work and communicate with other colleagues at ICAS that help make these events a success. Making sure that we're communicating is essential. Communication has been key within ICAS as well as embracing this new challenging digital world we now live in.”

“I’ve been with ICAS for fourteen years now, so I have seen a lot of change, both in people and in how we work. I came to ICAS from further education, starting as Executive Director for Finance & Resources, and now as Chief Operating Officer. I’ve seen ICAS evolve continuously over the years and digital has been a huge source of change in recent years – that has accelerated to the point where we were able to move all of our activity online very quickly during the early days of COVID. I’d say that we have developed an ICAS culture that aims to be collaborative and inclusive – and we have discovered some key strengths and self-confidence as an organisation during so much change. I’m here because it’s always developing, always moving and there is always something different to get involved in. It’s challenging but very rewarding here.”

“I came to ICAS from Australia, where I trained as a CA in late 2019. I’d moved out of accounting and into a training/teaching role and the opportunity here in Learning really appealed to me. So, we moved from Sydney to Edinburgh just in time for COVID, but we’re settled in here now and to be honest the onboarding has been pretty smooth. From the teaching perspective, learning how to teach and engage remotely is a new skill to learn, but everyone has helped and it’s gone well. It would be nice to have the social element so hopefully that comes back in some form post COVID. ICAS is a world renowned brand in our profession and it’s a new and innovative experience working here.”

"I joined ICAS four years ago on a five month consultancy project to write the roadmap for the digital transformation project – and liked the challenges we have overcome so much I have stayed on to deliver our strategy. We have created a different way of working. We brought in a much more agile-based delivery mechanism, based round the idea that it was a business-based transformation rather than a typical IT or technology led transformation as you do these days. The organisation that you see today is wholeheartedly different to the business I joined four years ago – the ability to be smaller and actually deliver projects has been fantastic - there's massive opportunities to do things differently – it’s a fantastic place to work.”

"I came to ICAS from a Head of Function role at Tesco Bank. I was looking for a new challenge and hadn’t thought of ICAS – our offices were right beside each other but I didn’t know what ICAS did. I took a bit of persuading but went along to meet them – and was really surprised. I could see that my role as Senior Insight Manager would give me an opportunity to shape strategy and build a small team into something much bigger and be driving direction. And here I am now three years later, Head of Insights & Analytics. When I first arrived, I remember thinking that this was not really what I expected, and it’s changed even more in the last few years. It’s all been very positive and incredibly well managed. I’m surrounded by great people. If you’re looking for a role where you can have autonomy and be able to make things happen quickly, then ICAS is for you.”

“I came to ICAS about a year and a half ago as Executive Director of Member Engagement and Communications. I have a strong background in working for professional bodies – my last role was Global Director of the Profession at RICS, where I spent 20 years in various UK and global roles. Here I have a team of 24, and we deal with Member, internal and external communications, including content creation, PR, managing digital and social channels – basically all of our membership communication activity, and I also have a Data and Insight team gathering data from Members and stakeholders to support engagement. COVID arrived when I hadn’t been at ICAS that long, but it’s been a bonding experience in many ways. ICAS is a great organisation with lots of potential – a heritage brand moving with the times.”