Accounting Career Advice

I currently work as a Sr Financial Analyst and have had jobs before this one that were very accounting centric.

From my experience, accounting roles tend to be good for people who are extremely detail oriented. In most accounting jobs, you will spend most of your time forecasting, booking journal entries, analyzing balance sheet accounts and helping business partners understand business performance and holding them accountable to meet budget goals.

For accounting jobs in most fortune 500 companies, you will need to be an expert at building powerpoint presentations and excel models. Most importantly, you will need to be able to quantify the impact of management decisions and be deal with major corporate hierarchies. You will be expected to work long hours when necessary. You will be privy to confidential conversations often and be expected to know the numbers like the back of your hand. You will need to be accountable for forecasts and more importantly be able to build bridges that tell the story of your units business performance. At the lowest level, being an expert at the intricacies of the accounts you deal with will make you a rockstar. The biggest thing you need to be careful about is accuracy. If you are constantly revising data that you provide, you will gain a reputation of poor reliability and people in your organization will not trust data you provide.

Anyways thats my 2 cents about accounting. Alot of people get in as interns while in college. My major was Finance and I was fortunate to get recruited right out of school into a leadership development program at a big company.