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The sky's the limit

Meet Nathan Conduit, PQ Magazine's NQ of the Year

Sky News, Sky Sports, Sky Movies, Sky Finance… hold on, Sky Finance? Yet behind every successful company is a successful… finance team. Unfortunately, Joe Public isn't aware of it, which is why winning one of our prestigious national awards is all the more important for putting the right people in the spotlight.

Admittedly, working for Sky has a certain kudos of its own; however, standing in Sky's reception posing with arms thrust in the air like a boxing champion is maybe not the coolest thing to be doing on a Monday morning. But Nathan Conduit manages to smile through the teasing of passing colleagues. Maybe the £1,000 in his pocket and Newly Qualified Accountant of the Year award helps to keep the grin there.

Twenty-eight-year-old Conduit, a corporate finance analyst in the company, is ready for the insults - he's an accountant after all. But he doesn't care, because he loves his job and in a refreshingly honest way he's not modest about it: "I've done a lot of good stuff at Sky," he admits. Conduit was part of the team that delivered one of the fastest annual reports for a FTSE 100 company (26 days from close to results announcement), he has been a main part of the team working on the transition from UK GAAP to IFRS and a key audit contact during the 2006 and 2007 year-ends.

Conduit is also exam co-ordinator for the graduate scheme at Sky, which was also his route through the CIMA qualification. Sky won CIMA employer of the year in November 2006 and at the May 2007 CIMA exam sitting the scheme's students hit its highest-ever pass rate of 98 per cent from over 70 papers sat. Conduit is proud of this, possibly because he wasn't a first-time passer himself. "I was a little over-ambitious and tried sitting four intermediate papers in one go," he says. Even so, Conduit completed his qualification within three years and is confident that not achieving first-time passes won't affect his career. "How I do my job is more important," he stresses.

Along with BPP's Malcolm Bell, Conduit has had a huge input in ensuring other trainees become prize-winners through the establishment of a study programme. "We introduced an unseen mock exam, which BPP wrote for us. We made sure those who struggled on certain areas had additional paper-specific lessons. I have a good working relationship with Malcolm Bell. But I also have to give credit to our recruitment process - Sky picks very good candidates."

Since joining Sky after completing his masters degree at Cambridge five years ago, Conduit has worked across the company - with the commercial finance team doing management reporting, in group reporting and now in the corporate finance team working on mergers and acquisitions. Each time, his CIMA training has come into its own. While in group finance he was consolidating Sky's group balance sheet on a monthly basis, providing the CFO with a high level analytical review on year-to-date movements. He also completed financial due diligence on a number of acquisitions, typically analysing the target's financial statements to see whether they had any undisclosed liabilities, how their accounting policies differed from Sky's, what IFRS transition adjustments would be required and what impact they would have on Sky's pro-forma financial statements.

Such experience makes Conduit a recruiter's dream. But he stresses you don't get things easily at Sky - "you have to push yourself and make sure you don't get pigeon-holed", he says. Of course, it helps if you have a career plan. "When I was at UCL I realised I could go into the City or become an accountant. I wanted to be involved with the business decisions." That experience bodes well for his goal of becoming an FD, though in an ideal world he'd be either a cricketer or salsa dancer - but that's another story.