Good morning and Happy Monday! Here’s some news to start the week and give you something to talk about around the virtual watercooler.
Auditing is the most “in demand” finance career right now according to a new study from CMC Markets, an online trading platform, which analysed monthly Google searches using Ahrefs for jobs within the financial industry. Searches for ‘auditor’ ranked number one on the list with 222,500 monthly Google searches. People are searching 5,000 times on average a month for ‘auditor jobs’ and 500 times for ‘auditor careers’. [Accountancy Today]
Head over to Forbes to read about 28-year-old Nick Hobson, “the accountant who became an unlikely cricket hero in Australia’s Big Bash League.” He’s been having a good run though he’s not a full-time cricket player just yet, he still has a day job at EY. He’s been on leave for two months so far.
“I actually called them last week and the first thing they said was ‘you’re not coming back Monday are you’. I said ‘no I’m not’,” grinned Hobson about his office job.
“I’ll come back the week after. I’ll let it all decompress.”
I have no clue what’s happening here but apparently this guy is good.
Good news! The robots are finally coming for your job! Hurry up, technology, we’re counting on you.
Someone is going to launch an AI that does better work than 99% of tax/accounting firms and Intuit is going to buy it for a trillion.
Accounting is the most rules-based profession. The only reason it hasn’t been automated is the human “consultative” element. Chat AI solves this.
— Xavier Helgesen (@XavierHelgesen) February 5, 2023
The Life at Deloitte blog has a piece about reentering the workforce written by a woman who took five years off to focus on family. It’s full of the usual jargon and self-promotion but there are some tips at the end that may be helpful. Like to think about what success looks like for you and to be honest about any employment gaps.
PwC surveyed a whole mess of CEOs and those CEOs are not feeling very hopeful about the future. Almost 40% of them say their company won’t be “economically viable” within the next decade unless they make some big changes. PwC’s 26th Global CEO Survey provides key statistics from 4410 CEOs across 105 countries on contemporary issues facing the global economy.
What are the skills KPMG looks for in consultants?
There are a range of technical skillsets that we are looking for, including digital, cloud, blockchain, strategy and architecture, scaling agile, transformation delivery, and automation.
We want people to have a product mindset and we look for not only technical skills, but also how a person uses them.
The rapidly changing landscape within technology means that we need our employees to continuously keep up with developments in this area and have a willingness to try new methods.
The additional soft skills that we look for employees to combine with their technical skillset would include communication skills, stakeholder management, team work and an ability to solve complex problems.
If you’re a single Black man with dependents who claims the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), you have a 7.73% chance of being audited by the IRS in any given year. For Americans as a whole, the equivalent figure is just 0.54%. [Axios]
[British-American cybersecurity company] Darktrace has rebutted claims from a US hedge fund that alleges the cyber security group appears to have created “fictitious clients” in an attempt to inflate sales figures, defending itself from the short seller’s attack.
The FTSE 250 company announced on Wednesday that it would buy back up to £75mn worth of shares a day after New York-based Quintessential Capital Management published a detailed report on Tuesday alleging irregular accounting practices at Darktrace.
Quintessential’s allegations include: Darktrace appears to have simulated or anticipated sales to “phantom” customers through a “network of willing resellers”; that it seems to have incorrectly booked sales of hardware as software; and may have misrepresented the nature of its revenue.
Poppy Gustafsson, Darktrace chief executive, described Quintessential’s allegations as “unfounded inferences”. “I stand by my team and the business I represent,” she said in a statement on Wednesday, arguing the company has robust accounting and auditing practices.
Someone on Twitter got really upset about this screenshot and accused us of not reading the article. Read it for yourself.
LOL how about GFY pic.twitter.com/LIbLR7ICvt
— Going Concern (@going_concern) February 3, 2023
That’s all I’ve got for today. If you see something interesting going down out there give me a shout and have a great week!
