[accountabergs]

Hey everyone,

I am coming up on my 2 year mark at one of the big 4 (based in Pittsburgh), and I am beginning to look for other opportunities. Big 4, and auditing in general, is not for me, and I am pretty open to other career ideas.

I definitely want something less demanding (doesn’t everyone? haha), but I also want something that is interesting and gets the creative juices flowing. I play in a band locally (and starting to branch out to other areas on the weekends), so that is my main concern and being able to fulfill that desire is a top priority of mine.

I could be interested in an accounting or finance position, and I am leaning towards a private company if possible. I’d rather not deal with a public company and all of the regulations and SEC requirements (I’m not lazy, but I see this as a negative attribute. Feel free to sway me and change my mind, I am all ears!)

Any ideas? Thanks for reading

Passed in 2014

FAR- (5/27) 88
REG- (2/20) 70, Rematch: (7/2)83
BEC- (4/2) 85
AUD- (4/24) 87

Using Becker live classes and online materials

"if you get confused, listen to the music play"

[Anonymous]

Accounting doesn't generally get very creative, so I'm not sure that private accounting will fulfill that desire, either. It may be better than auditing (first-year and second-year auditing assignments sound incredibly dull!), but it's not creative. My first accounting boss had a saying that I can't remember exactly, but it was something along the lines of “Creative accounting lands you in prison”. 😛

That being said, I think you need to consider whether you need creativity during the work-day in order to feel fulfilled and need to consider moving out of the strict accounting world and into something else (perhaps related, but not specifically accounting), or if you need to find something with good work-life balance in accounting that finances your ability to do creative things on the evening and weekend, like playing in your band.

If you think you might want to try to find a way to leverage your accounting experience to get an accounting-related-but-more-creative job, I'd suggest going to any job search site (Indeed, Monster, etc.) and just typing “accounting” into the search field and seeing what non-accountant jobs list accounting skills, to get some ideas of related fields. One example would be administrative systems support, where you might be able to work on a systems implementation team, programming solutions for individual clients to implement new accounting software. An accounting background could help in that field, but my version of creativity would be better satisfied in programming software than in doing accounting. However, I'm not super creative – improving Excel worksheets is enough creativeness to fulfill my need for creativeness in my daily work. 🙂 So, I'm not saying this is the winner solution, but it's just an example of something that might come up when searching “accounting” on Monster. Business Process Analyst is one that I've seen come up that is the analysis side of creativity, analyzing processes and coming up with better ones; some of these positions request prior accounting or audit experience. Searching like this you'll also see lots of things like manager at Taco Bell or teller at the bank which all list basic accounting skills, but you can get a few leads buried in the pile of other items.

Of course a complete career switch might also be what you decide you need. However, it would be unfortunate to have landed the Big 4 gig, and put in all that time and effort, just to leave the accounting world entirely. 😐

[Author]

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