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Deepak Swaroop has been a partner at EY in London for nearly 20 years. This position is known to attract a lot of people. Average salary is £803,000; Approximately 1 million dollars. Swaroop earned his MBA and completed a Business Administration course from Harvard University and from MIT he completed an AI course.
In 2020, he left Takamine’s world of finance to become a high school math teacher, but took a significant pay cut in the process.
Swaroop starts career consulting at Arthur Andersen & Company in India
Swaroop grew up in Delhi and Mumbai in the 1970s and 1980s. Although he was born into a family of talented engineers, his aptitude for finance earned him a promotion at the global financial consultancy firm Arthur Andersen & Co.
“I built a valuation practice supporting foreign investment in India in the ’90s. I worked my way up from senior consultant to manager to director,” Swaroop told Business Insider.
In 2000, Swaroop jumped at the chance to be promoted to Chief of Staff for EMEIA at the company. Europe, Middle East, India, Africa―― Business executive employee. The opportunity included company benefits, including a move from Derry to a four-bedroom apartment in London’s exclusive St. John’s Wood district and paying for her two young children’s private school in London. It was included.
Shortly after Swaroop himself became a partner in 2001, Arthur Andersen & Company went bankrupt. This accounting firm was implicated in a major scandal involving the US energy company Enron. Energy companies went bankrupt and Arthur Andersen was dissolved.
Swaroop becomes an EY partner
Swaroop was one of the 85,000 employees who lost their jobs. He had to decide whether to return to India or remain in the UK without receiving company benefits. “My wife and I said we didn’t want it to affect our children’s education, so that would be the only consistent thing if we wanted to stay in London,” Mr Swaroop said. “We said we’d take a year to see if it would work.”
He and his wife decide to move to a small apartment in a cheaper borough of London to cut costs. They relied on their own savings to send their children to private education.
During this period, Swaroop started his career at EY. Swaroop, along with many of his colleagues at Arthur Andersen & Company, joined EY after EY acquired part of Arthur Andersen & Company’s business.
“I was in the right place at the right time.”
Swaroop shone at EY. He pioneered the adoption of automation and AI through his EY team and built the company’s Automation Central division in 2015.
“We were able to build the team quickly because we felt like we were in the right place at the right time and had the right knowledge of the organization,” Swaroop told BI. “People tell me this is still the largest operation of its kind in the corporate world, so we’ve done a really good thing,” he added.
EY was reorganized and Swaroop was no longer excited about his role.
After reorganizing his company in 2019, Swaroop told BI he was faced with another big decision: accept a major change in his role or exit the business. He chose the latter.
“I felt like working there had never been so much fun for me anymore,” Swaroop said. “So I took early retirement, partly because I wanted to launch a startup.”
He spent the next year co-founding an enterprise AI platform, but quickly left it. He told BI that it wasn’t the change he was looking for in corporate life.
Life after retirement wasn’t fulfilling, but teaching was the solution.
Swaroop was 56 years old. He paid off his mortgage and supported his adult children through college. His former partner’s next step was early retirement. But he found his new schedule of golf, walking, and going to the library to be unsatisfying.
Mr Swaroop told BI that he read about Lucy Kellaway, the Financial Times editor who left journalism to become a teacher-in-training. In 2017, Kellaway founded Now Teach, an organization that helped her transition into teaching. After he took classes at five different schools, his mind was made up. Swaroop wanted to retrain as a high school math teacher.
Three years on, Swaroop told BI that he feels energized and inspired by his new career, even if his current income is a fraction of what he was before.of Maximum salary for qualified teachers In London, it’s about 50,000 pounds, according to the British government.
The pay cut didn’t matter as long as Swaroop was making a difference.
Swaroop said salary was not the deciding factor in his move, as he knew it would not be as good as his previous salary.
“I wanted to do something with a purpose so I could contribute to society in some way,” Swaroop said.
Swaroop said it was difficult for him to enter the teaching profession as a beginner in his 50s. Around him were much younger, more experienced comrades. He also felt that standing in front of teenagers all day was more demanding than working in an office. But he has been buoyed by the energy, humor, and love of his students and the way he motivates them to learn.
“I just want to get into the classroom and teach. I don’t have a goal of becoming a principal. Before, I was actively trying to move up the ladder. It turned into an aspiration.’ My teaching,” Swaroop said.
“Students write to me saying I helped them realize their potential and the path they want to take in the future. That is worth more to me than money.”