Oh yippee, another arbitrary decision to slap "accountant" on a best of list! Except this one comes courtesy U.S. News & World Report so you should probably give it slightly more weight than some hack Yahoo list written by a freelancer making half a cent a word:
Were you the kid who always made straight A’s in math? A career full of audits, taxes and accounts receivable might await you. The Labor Department predicts more than 166,000 new openings will be created in this field from now to 2022.
Accountant was beat out by operations research analyst in the #2 spot and market research analyst in #1.
Overall, accountant ranked #39 in the 100 Best Jobs list. U.S. News came to this conclusion using a bunch of important data like growth volume, salary, stress level and work-life balance. Don't put too much weight in that data, of course, as our own Greg Kyte pointed out on Twitter, "the results are clearly unaudited."
Back with more from the accounting career mailbag: a former Deloitte employee left the firm recently only to discover that life outside public accounting isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Should they return to the Greed Dot???
I am writing to you in the hopes that you can provide some insight. Here is my situation, I worked at Deloitte for about four years now in the Pacific Southwest region of the US. I recently quit and took a job at one of the big public Companies in my city. After being there for a couple of months I’ve realized that I am kind of bored and am considering going back to public accounting.
The partner I worked for at DT told me to call him anytime. Before I make that call I wanted to get some input. If I go back I’ll be a manager within a year, does the job function change that much like they are telling me? I’m single and in the long term I’m not sure what I want, for now I just want to work get some more experience and then figure it out.
Considering Going Back
Dear Considering,
Your problem is not an uncommon one. Many people have spent their entire careers bitching about life inside public accounting only once they leave, they come to the conclusion that they never had it so good. There are a couple of ways to interpret this:
1. You really do love public accounting and you truly believe it is your calling in life.
2.
Of course every situation is different and in your case, you’re looking at a promotion to manager in a year. Let’s give the partner the benefit of the doubt here and consider your question about life as a manager. Personally, we didn’t have the pleasure of reaching the rank but know plenty of friends and colleagues who did and many, many, many of them said it was their toughest year of their career to date.
What happens is that your auditing skills become less important and your time management and people skills begin to take center stage. Can you handle staffing issues? Prepare a presentation for a RFP? Convince a partner that a client really isn’t that pissed and you’re not getting fired (when, in fact, the opposite is true)? This is just a taste of your responsibilities. OH! And do you like reviewing other people’s work? Because you’ll have to squeeze that in as well.
Now that we’ve scared the living daylights out of you – it sounds like you’re more concerned with enjoying your job and getting good experience rather than money. That’s rare around these parts, so good for you.
Bottom line is this – if you’re not happy at your current job and think that career bliss awaits you back at the Green Dot with Sharon and the Costanza Twins, you should go back.
Peanut gallery – what do we think here? Back into the belly of the beast or is it a huge mistake? Fire away.
