At 20 years old, our guest for this episode, Amy Rylance, started her CTA journey.
She’d breezed through ATT, no trouble at all. She expected CTA to be more difficult, but not as difficult as it turned out to be.
She was determined to pass, going through multiple fails, and then hit a huge roadblock where she was close to giving up.
Earlier this year, she got the news that she’d passed and become a Chartered Tax Adviser.
Result!
Amy’s not the only one to have such an experience.
She’s a super bright individual that just didn’t have the right mindset and approach for passing these papers. But when she changed that, that’s when it all clicked.
So in this episode, Amy shares her journey (the ups and downs), the mistakes she made, what she did differently when she passed, and her advice to help you get through your CTA exams.
Listen to the episode by clicking the play button at the top of this page, or by searching for “The Tax Professionals Podcast” in your podcast player of choice.
Guest – Amy Rylance
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amy-rylance-73ab8114a/
Rough Timings
- A bit about Amy and her tax career
- (5:45) Overview of Amy’s ATT and CTA journey, including what happened when she sat her first CTA paper
- (12:00) Amy’s key advice for passing the CTA Application and Professional Skills (APS) paper
- (16:30) With hindsight, how would Amy have prepared differently for the CTA Human Capital Advanced Technical Paper (HC AT)
- (19:15) How Amy kept motivated and determined to pass after her knockbacks and why she almost gave up
- (25:00) The evolution of her mindset – to get the right one to pass
- (28:00) What Amy did differently, the time that she passed – how she passed and studied learnt the whole syllabus with a deep understanding of the topics
Resources
Tax flashcards/squares – email Jack (jack@thetaxprofessionalspodcast.com) or Nitin (cta@bpp.com) for samples.
FREE – CTA Study Phase Checklist so you can make sure you ‘complete’ the study phase before revision, going into revision as prepared as you can
FREE – ATT/CTA revision folder guide, which was made when the exams became open book. This is somewhat outdated now, but there is still useful information in there
FREE – 8 CTA/ATT revision tips summary, which does exactly what it says on the tin
Other exam-support related podcast episodes: https://www.thetaxprofessionalspodcast.com/category/podcast/att-cta/
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