Growing through curiosity, collaboration, and real impact at KPMG Lighthouse

I spent three years as a functional analyst at a bank before joining KPMG Lighthouse. That was already a strong first experience, I worked across different teams and gained exposure to a wide range of topics. But over time, I realized I wanted even more variety and new challenges. I wanted to keep landing in situations where I hadn't figured everything out yet, rather than becoming too comfortable in one spot. Consulting gave me exactly that opportunity.

One of the things that stood out to me from the start was how quickly you're given real meaningful responsibility. Nobody eases you into a topic for months before trusting you with it. Instead, you're expected to deliver, and that challenge pushes you to learn quickly. I had to get up to speed on things I barely understood when I started, and honestly, that’s one of the aspects of the job I enjoy most. It hasn't slowed down since. With agentic AI evolving rapidly, continuous learning is simply part of the job. You can’t rely solely on what you learned two years ago, you need to keep growing.

The projects I find most rewarding rarely stay in one lane. Data is everywhere and messy in a different way every time. It becomes especially valuable when strategy, governance, and delivery come together around it. What really makes these projects work is having the right mix of people in the room, each pulling on a different thread of the problem until a bigger picture starts to emerge.

The real difference isn't some piece of technology, plenty of firms have access to similar tools. What's harder to replicate is the culture of collaboration. At Lighthouse, this means working with people who bring something different: some people are deep in delivery, others in governance or strategy. It goes beyond our own team too. Some of my favorite projects have involved people from compliance, audit, or banking backgrounds, all looking at the same challenge through a different lens. Those diverse perspectives usually lead to the strongest outcomes.

If you get restless doing the same thing for too long, if you'd rather be handed a problem you don’t know how to solve yet than one you've already mastered, you'll like it here. You won't be the smartest person in the room for long because the room keeps changing on you, which is exactly why you keep growing.

What keeps me here isn't one big thing. It's a colleague who explains something for the third time without making you feel inferior, or a project that pulls in people from three different backgrounds and somehow still comes together. If that sounds more exciting than exhausting, you'll fit in fine. 

Svetlana Arutunyan, Manager Technology Advisory