Finance

Money is the life blood of business; and finance is the support function which ensures its propagation, conscientious husbandry, efficient circulation and effective deployment to maintain, protect and promote the health of an organisation.

In an organisation as large and complex as the Cobham Group, finance is necessarily a large and complex function, touching on and involved in everything that happens in all of our individual business units both discretely and as a corporate whole. For the purpose of this introduction, we will group the function's activities under three broad headings.*

*For the purpose of this introduction, we also assume no prior knowledge on the part of the reader. Part-qualified or qualified professionals interested in Finance careers with the Cobham Group may like to refer to the Investors section on the Cobham Home page.

Minding the shop

Keeping score in the day-to-day operation of production, manufacturing and other business units is among the most fundamental of finance's responsibilities, accounting for and recording where the money goes. As a starting point for graduates, this provides equally a practical grounding for those already electing to go into finance and excellent lessons in life for future project, programme or business leaders. The core tasks involved in supporting a unit - monitoring and controlling income and expenditure - may be essentially the same, but in terms of scale, complexity and context the variety of environments existing within Cobham offers opportunities to gain exceptional depth and breadth of experience: in your 3-9 month placement alone you may find yourself working as one of a very small team embedded in a specialist production unit, or in the midst of a much bigger department serving a multi million turnover company.

Directing the flow

How can money be made to work harder? Sitting alongside business and production managers, customers and suppliers, finance people provide specialist input into budgets, proposals, costing methodologies and business model reviews to identify inefficiencies and design improved processes that maximise value derived per pound expended. People stepping straight in to roles or rotations at this (roughly middle-management) level will already have developed considerable expertise in skills relevant to business and finance, whether in the course of their degree studies or from relevant internships or employment; however, the project-based nature of much of this type of work does also make it a natural test-bed for challenging our graduates.

Captaining industry

Finance is a professional discipline whose paths lead to senior management within companies, but lead also into the realm of corporate finance - the treasury, tax, financial assurance and investor relations aspects of Cobham as a Public Limited Company, a corporate entity competing and operating in the world's financial markets. Between one third and one half of the PLC's entire staff is composed of financial professionals, qualified and experienced personnel selected from leading accountancy firms, from positions of comparable responsibility in industry, and - increasingly, as we wish to see - from talent developed within the Group. This is the level at which the most demanding professional challenges emerge: the strategic planning, corporate governance, investment, acquisition and structural decisions which set the future direction for the whole of Cobham.

Routes to qualification

If as an undergraduate or a recent graduate you have more or less decided on a traditional, mainstream Finance career (such as pure accountancy), we would be the first to say that Cobham may not be your best initial option: instead, a graduate development programme with a leading audit firm can fast track you to the professional qualifications that we would later welcome within the Group.

If, however, you are attracted to finance particularly because of its active role in industry, our Graduate Development Programme may be ideal: CIMA is a fully-supported qualification at Cobham, so study leave and examination support are provided to graduates on appropriate rotations.