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Never. But you get really good at pretending
Feel the same way. I’m almost a year in and feel like I’m completely lost when it comes to technical items. Is it just going to come down to reading regs?
If you are just starting out I wouldn’t read the regs, I am a senior manager and I don’t even start reading the regs. There are still a lot of things I come across that I haven’t seen before, and when that happens I start with the BNA, CCH, or a summary from a BIG4. Only after I get general understanding, then I read the code and regs.
From my experience, staff don’t ask enough questions. Just a lot of silence and nodding heads, there is seriously no stupid question.
im almost 3 years in and split between Tp and cross borser tax, still not there yet. I get the basic structures and IC lending stuff, but not enough to verbally explain it on the spot
I’m 7 years in and still learning new things. It’s always a learning process and with how fast laws are changing no one ever knows everything. Read as much as you can because that helps a lot with the confidence.
Do you feel that, when given an assignment, you’re not allocated enough hours/budget to actually learn and understand what you’re doing so you can find an answer to the question? I’ve been struggling with taking too long to do things (and eating hours) because I’m having to spend time getting foundational knowledge of some concepts before I can find the answer. Anyone else been in a similar boat? And how did you improve when there’s really not enough time built in to actually learn?
Please don’t eat hours if you’re putting in your best effort to learn / complete the task, especially as an associate. Your rate doesn’t hit the WIP that hard and realization can absorb the time cost - the extra time it takes new hires / associates is literally one of the reasons we have realization in codes.
That being said, don’t spend 8 hours researching a topic to do one small task. I’ve told the associates / new hires on my team that they should but in a good effort and come up with what they THINK an answer is in a set amount of time then come talk to me. I’ll do a bit of research in meantime and confirm approach with manager and walk the associate through it when they come with their idea.
We don’t want you to be lost, but understand that feeling uncomfortable and not knowing things is how you learn.
The other aspect is that your hours are the ONLY quantitative measure available to your teams and deployment to understand how busy you are. If you eat time, you’re going to get put on more stuff and will eventually end up buried with no time to learn and not helping anyone because you’re too busy to spend the time needed on a project / client
I’m about 2.5 years in and am in a similar boat. Confident enough to explain basics to my team as, but past that I’m useless (until you give me time to read a BNA). In my experience, basically everyone up to (senior) manager gets turned around when partners start going off haha, so I’m not too worried that I’m behind yet.
I don’t experience partners going off on concepts I don’t get, but if I’m ever pulling in WNT, they start talking way above my head (and I’m a JD/LLM 10 years out).
I feel the same way! That said, I think you’re learning more than you realize. I only noticed this personally some days a go when I was on a call with a WNT MD (Sub C Group) and I successfully explained my way through the intl tax aspects of a transaction we were working on - it felt really rewarding!
Wow, good to know I’m not the only one in this boat. I kind of understand what’s going on, but for the most part I’m definitely not confident in my knowledge base. I put in a solid effort though.
I started to feel more confident as a late senior / early manager. It took a lot of work reading materials beyond “what was required.”
In my experience it takes about 24 to 36 months to make a decent ITS associate. It depends on many factors, but that is a reasonable estimate. You are always learning though.
Not in B4 but trying to learn in industry and I would just say exposure over time helps. Ex. You work on MA involving AU and learn that there’s a stamp tax you might have to watch out for or that Argentina has an exit tax etc. You’ll remember these things next time around.
I also find missing something or making a mistake helps learn something but I wouldn’t recommend this route.