Nina Barakzai - Sutton High School 1972 - 1979

Group Compliance Officer

I am a solicitor, Chartered Management Accountant and a Member of the Chartered Institute of Arbitrators.  I also have a marketing qualification. My current job role is Group Compliance Officer for a communications company offering terrestrial and satellite broadcasting services to wholesalers; telephony and internet related products and services and television services via a cable network.  I am responsible for liaising with regulators and enforcement bodies who enforce the licences the comms group needs, to allow it to operate.   I am also the group’s Data Protection Officer and handle queries from Trading Standards offices nationally. 

I started out as an Economics graduate and entered the training programme to become a Chartered Accountant.  There was some interesting work, investigating a major insurance fraud on behalf of the DTI, but I wasn’t keen on the way we had to study.  So I joined a large telecoms company.  I worked on implementing new financial systems through the organisation nationally.  I did this for about 2 years.  During this period, I missed the challenge of studying, so I started a part time law degree as an external student of the University of London.  The organisation changed and because I was studying to qualify, I was given an opportunity to move into line management, running a national process for paying suppliers.  After another finance move to a computer manufacturing company doing finance and systems implementations, I left to go to a large news and media company, to implement their worldwide back office finance systems. 

I spent two years travelling round Western Europe, acting as a change management trouble shooter.  I also finished my law degree and started studying part-time for the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants qualification and got married.  I chose to move to another newspaper publishing house to implement financial systems and developed control processes to make sure any problems could be picked up quickly and resolved.  Part of this work involved putting checks in place to make sure the problems didn’t recur.  During this role, I qualified as a Chartered Management Accountant.   Once I had qualified, I moved to an international oil and gas exploration company and started doing large scale corporate finance, working on many big capital investment programmes and acting as part of a mergers and acquisitions team.  Part of this work counted towards one year of a two year period for articles as a solicitor.  After four years or so in the sector, I applied for a job in a regulator’s office, doing telecoms regulation.  This was my first real experience in an organisation very much like the civil service. The work I did qualified as the remaining part of the one year exemption of the two years for articles.  The experience was outstanding and made it very easy to move into a communications company.  When I moved, the company hired me on the basis that I would complete my final year of articles with it by carrying out my role as Group Compliance Officer.  I did this and was admitted to the Law Society’s role a year after joining the company.

My career has been one of varied disciplines, with new opportunities arising because I have continued to enhance my professional qualifications and stay up to date with European legislation.  I find my ability to adapt to the needs of the labour market by presenting various skills helps to get me into different sectors.  I have no idea whether I will be doing the same thing in five years’ time, but I do know I am lucky enough each time I move, to find work that is challenging and exciting. 

I am happy to be contacted via email. NTL has taken students for one or two week assignments so I would need to check what the current position is before promising work experience.