Sam Philpot Talks About the Diploma of Financial Counselling
Sam 00:11
My name is Sam, Samuel Philpot, and I graduated from Eva Burroughs College about a year ago now, and I initially got interested in the course because of my own personal struggles with personal finance in my young 20s.
I did make a couple of silly mistakes and had a lot of money being owed to people, and then I started getting on my own budget working through things and I wanted to line up my career path with helping people who were also struggling financially and I talked to many careers counsellors and it turned out that financial counselling was the career approach for me and I initially chose Eva Burrows College because of the heavy involvement in the financial counselling industry and me being a Christian myself, I thought I'd line up my own values with another Christian organisation.
I did hear about the course just on my own browsing. I was searching up who does the studies, it seemed it was best for me to do it online and the Salvation Army provided that course.
What I enjoyed most about the course was the constant learning. There's always something new to learn. You'll never stop learning even in financial counselling and I found that so fascinating and I found bits of areas of financial counselling that I wanted to progress more in, one being bankruptcy, consumer and credit law.
The studies, in terms of helping my future, I definitely have contacts that I can call upon, not just as I go out and practice, but they've also helped me to get more contacts to help develop my network as a financial counsellor. But in terms of the actual course content the studies have shaped my future by giving me a roadmap I'll say and being a self -paced course you do have to structure your own time. Similar to what I've learned now being a financial counsellor you do have to do it all, structure your own work yourself in terms of set your own deadlines for certain things.
What have I achieved since graduating Eva Burrows?
Well, a lot has happened since I've graduated, I'll say about a year ago. It was really, really hard to get work as a financial counsellor, even in my own specific circumstances. But I was volunteering for a charity, My Best Life Australia, and it's very nice knowing that it's a rarity, that what I've done and it's pretty surreal actually. I really can't believe it at some points but I've also continued to further study as well. The diploma was able to get me into university so now I'm also studying part -time a Bachelor of Law while managing my own financial counselling agency with me being the only financial counsellor. So the law degree will help me with my financial counselling on top of all the studies that I got during the diploma.
And if someone was considering enrolling in this course I would definitely recommend to go ahead and do it if it is the career path for you, but I would recommend that you go speak to some other financial counsellors beforehand, just so you get an understanding that this is the career path for you and you truly do want to go down this path. It does get difficult, it does get frustrating at times, but I'm sure that's like every career path.
So yeah this is just my little testimony for Eva Burrows College.
Thank you.
