It’s all about the money. But in a good way.
A survey conducted last year found that the majority of students in the last year of
university wanted to be accountants. Really? Isn’t it deathly, deathly boring, akin to watching black paint dry in a windowless room with no lights? Well, no. True, lion taming is always going to be higher on the table of ‘quite exciting things to try’, but there are plenty of factors that make accountancy a popular, and sometimes exciting, career. A big part of that is money – looking after it, making it, and keeping an eye on it in general…
Big responsibility
Accountants help businesses look after their money. The work ranges from putting a company’s financial records in order, to advising them on how to spend money wisely. From your local hairdresser to Nike, every business needs one (if not a whole team of them), so there is plenty of work out there. But not just anyone can do it: you need to have a good head for numbers, and you have to be highly organised and focused in your approach to work.
The spice of life
While accountants need to be fairly meticulous and serious in their approach to work, it is actually a career of enormous variety. Every business needs one, and that means an accountant can end up working in any industry or type of company they want. And there are numerous career paths within accountancy. Most people will decide to join a corporate accountancy firm. These companies have offices around the world,
offer many opportunities for travel, and pay impressive salaries. There are currently four
accountancy firms that, between them, take the lion’s share of the world’s accountancy business
– PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Ernst & Young and KPMG
– all of which regularly recruit university graduates to join their graduate trainee schemes. Joining one of these firms will mean sharp suits, lattes to go, and long
days at your very swish office. Some people are just born to do the corporate thing. But if that’s not for you, or you don’t want to go the university route, you can qualify as an accountant by taking a course provided by an organisation such as the Association of
Accounting Technicians. The advantage of this route is that you can learn ‘on the job’.
Options
Once qualified, you don’t have to join a huge corporation. You can set up on your own, or if you don’t like the idea of working in the corporate world but aren’t ready to go solo yet, join the accounts department of a company. Whether you want to work for a record label or a fashion retailer, all companies will have finance departments. Most people will tell you that the most exciting area of accounting is ‘forensic’ accounting. Rather than look after people’s money, a forensic accountant investigates the finances of criminals and companies with major money problems.
So glamorous is it that Jason Donovan was cast by the Australian TV network ABC to star in a series about a maverick forensic accountant, who goes to great lengths to get financial justice for his clients. No, seriously.
Don’t risk it
Working as a company accountant, you’ll often find yourself responsible for making sure that the company doesn’t do anything too risky with its money… It’s the accountant who tells the chief executive that it’s not wise to spend the employees’ wages on lottery tickets or a different rare dog for every day of the week, for example.
That said, taking risks is an important part of running a successful business (what would we do with ourselves in the evening if Mark Zuckerberg hadn’t dropped out of college to create Facebook?), so deciding exactly what risks a company should and should not take with money can also be an important part of an accountant’s role.
If you don’t feel that accountancy is for you, but you think calculating risks for a living might be something you could do, another interesting career might be that of an actuary. Actuaries are often employed by insurance companies to work out the mathematical probabilities of things happening. Say you are a professional athlete. One day you wake up in a cold sweat because you realise that if you lost your leg in an accident you would never be able to make a living. So you head to an insurance company who say that they will insure you against damage to your leg. That basically means that you pay the insurance company a certain amount every month for the security of knowing that, if anything ever happened to your leg, the insurance company would have to pay you enough money to live on.
The actuary is the person who decides how much you need to pay every month. They work it out by doing some very complex mathematical equations (the kind that make number-shy etc.’s eyes twitch just thinking about) to predict the risk of you losing your leg.
If you’ve done probabilities in maths and enjoyed it… you’ll love being an actuary. The other bonus is that, because it’s such a highly skilled job, it pays incredibly well!
Generally, if you have a head for numbers, you’ll do well in the world of accountancy. But to be one of the people who really get along, you need good business sense: a little bit of Alan Sugar’s attitude along with a meticulous eye for detail, and it’ll all start adding up…
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