Mentoring Across Borders: What Fresh Graduates Ask That Senior Leaders Forget
Fresh graduates reach out on LinkedIn with questions that cut through the noise senior professionals have learned to tolerate. Their questions are worth answering, and worth listening to.
A few times a month, someone reaches out on LinkedIn. Usually a fresh graduate or early-career professional, often from India, sometimes from the Middle East or Africa, asking some version of the same question: "How do I build a career in tax technology?" or "Is it worth getting a CPA if I want to move abroad?" or simply "How did you get to where you are?"
I reply to every one. Not because I have a formula, I do not, but because the questions themselves are worth engaging with. They cut through the professional noise that accumulates after 15 years in the industry. And they force me to examine whether the advice I would give matches the path I actually took.
The Question Nobody Asks at Senior Level
The most common question from fresh graduates is deceptively simple: "What should I learn first?" Senior professionals never ask this. By the time you are a director or partner, you have accumulated so much context that the idea of choosing what to learn feels quaint. But it is the most consequential career question anyone faces, and the answer has changed dramatically in the last five years.
When I started, the answer was straightforward: learn accounting, pass your exams (CA, CPA, or equivalent), join a Big 4 firm, and specialise from there. That path still works. But it is no longer the only path, and it may not even be the optimal one for someone entering the field today. Technology fluency, not just using Excel, but understanding how systems think, how data flows, how automation changes the nature of compliance work, is now as important as technical tax knowledge.
I tell graduates: get your professional qualification, because it opens doors that nothing else can. But invest equal energy in understanding technology. Not coding necessarily, though that helps, but the architecture of how tax data moves from a trial balance to a tax return. That understanding is what separates a tax professional from a tax technologist, and the latter is where the demand is growing.
Global Career Moves
Many of the people who reach out are considering a move abroad, from India to the Gulf, from the Gulf to the UK, from the UK to somewhere else. I have made several of these moves myself, and the pattern I have observed is consistent: the professional qualification travels, but the context does not.
A CA from India is technically qualified to work in most jurisdictions. But knowing Indian tax law does not help you with UAE Corporate Tax or UK corporation tax. Each move requires rebuilding domain knowledge from scratch while leveraging the analytical framework your qualification gave you. The qualification is the operating system; the local tax law is the application. You reinstall the app, but the OS carries over.
What I wish someone had told me earlier: the hardest part of a global career move is not the technical learning curve. It is the professional network reset. You go from being "the person everyone calls for X" to being "the new person who seems competent but has no track record here." Rebuilding that reputation takes 12-18 months of consistent delivery, and there is no shortcut.
Why Qualifications Still Matter
There is a growing narrative — particularly in technology circles — that professional qualifications are outdated gatekeeping. I disagree, at least in tax. A CA, CPA, or CIOT qualification is not just a credential. It is a structured way of learning how to think about complex, ambiguous problems under time pressure. The exam process — particularly the case-study-based finals — trains a mode of analysis that is directly applicable to real advisory work.
More practically, qualifications are how clients and employers establish baseline trust. When a multinational hires someone to implement their Pillar Two compliance framework, they want to know that the person has passed a rigorous assessment of their technical competence. The qualification does not guarantee competence — I have worked with qualified professionals who were mediocre and unqualified ones who were exceptional — but it provides a starting point that "I taught myself from YouTube" does not.
My advice to anyone early in their career: get qualified. Pick the qualification that aligns with where you want to work geographically (CA for India, CPA for the US and Middle East, ACA or CTA for the UK). Then immediately start building the technology skills that the qualification syllabus underweights. The combination of professional qualification plus technology fluency is the most in-demand profile in tax today.
What Mentoring Teaches the Mentor
Every conversation with a fresh graduate recalibrates my own perspective. They ask questions I stopped asking years ago — "Why does this process exist?" or "Why does everyone do it this way?" — and sometimes I realise the honest answer is "because nobody questioned it." That is useful information for someone whose job involves redesigning tax processes.
Mentoring is not charity. It is a feedback loop. The graduates get direction. I get a reminder of what the fundamentals actually are, stripped of the institutional context and political considerations that accumulate with seniority. Both sides are better for the exchange.