Accountancy career advice

TKNY1989

Hi Everyone,

Hope you are safe and well.

I wanted some career advice. I am a newly qualified ICAEW Chartered Accountant but I have trained in industry as opposed to practice. Majority of my experience to date has been in FP&A/ Commercial Finance, I want to know whether it would be a good investment in my career to make a move to practice, and attempting to get a role at a Big 6 or Big 4. The move will most likely be to audit. I would ideally like to move to debt advisory of Transaction advisory services, however these areas I know are more competitive and I would be up against other Big4/Big 6 candidates looking to move here, so chances are very slim. The reason I've been thinking about moving to practice for a little while (maybe 14 - 16 months) is because it could potentially be a good investment in myself. I know large accountancy practices invest heavily in their trainees/staff and give them a great set of skills and a foundation to become good solid professionals long term in their careers. Ultimately I do want to end up in an industry based role and it's easy for me to stay in industry right now. I just think given I am still young and do not have family responsibilities that this could be a great investment in building my technical accounting skills. I know it looks strange to move from industry to practice but do you think this is a good idea ? Do you also think it will be hard to find a role in industry afterwards ? Do you also think I will be able to build a great set of skills by working in practice as opposed to industry ? Like could I ask them to give me further excel training or training on different softwares like Tableu ? Would they give training on improving your soft skills ?

Interested to know your thoughts. Thanks.

AskAsk

can you explain what you mean by industry and practice?

TKNY1989

So working in industry means working for a private ltd company or a listed company on the London stock exchange. Working in industry is just working in an in-house finance function in a company. Working in practice is working for one an accountancy practice i.e PwC, KPMG, EY etc... Carrying out client facing work such as Audit, Tax etc... 

AskAsk

TKNY1989 said:

So working in industry means working for a private ltd company or a listed company on the London stock exchange. Working in industry is just working in an in-house finance function in a company. Working in practice is working for one an accountancy practice i.e PwC, KPMG, EY etc... Carrying out client facing work such as Audit, Tax etc... 

i did think you meant this but wasn't sure.  it must be a standard terminolgy that you use in accountancy.  i am more familiar with the terminology 'consultancy' for what you term 'practice'.

i am not an accountant but i have worked for some of the big accountancy firms.  they are very competive to get into and i understand that is because they pay more than working in industry.  they also expect you to work long hours.  i have no experience working in industry so i can't give you a comparison.

they don't treat staff very well but if you are willing to work hard, work long hours and are very bright then the pay reward can be significant.

they normally recruit very bright graduates and train them.  i have been told that they fire them very quickly if they do not do well in their professional exams so job security was a big problem for those who are not high flyers.  as you state you are already qualified this may not be relevant to you.

they did have a lot of training for staff.  and you do have to have personal skills as it is more people facing than just number crunching.

i don't know what it is like in industry so i can't comment on whether it would be advantageous to move to consultancy.  

Sandtree

Big 4 experience is never going to look bad on someone’s CV but it can be fairly brutal time whilst you are there... an ex boss (strategy rather than accountancy) came from a big 4 and took a modest paycut to achieve a better life balance but then afterwards found it was effectively a much bigger financial hit than she was expecting because with free time and coming home at a reasonable hour her spending went up massively with having to buy dinner, drinks with friends etc etc.

Whilst I understand the terms of industry and practice they don’t really have strong parallels to the worlds that I am closest to (project/change, actuarial, IT etc). In my world its moderately straight forward to move from industry to consultancy however there are certain nuances of skills they look for such as quickly coming up with basic analysis/hypothosis and what really comes down to sales pitch.

If you work in industry already are there none of your colleagues that are ex-big 4 that you can talk to? Most the FP&A peops I’ve dealt with tend to be overworked, stressed but generally a friendly/helpful bunch (less so their actuarial conterparts) 

GavinB80

I think you may find it difficult - but not impossible - to move to a big 4 as a qualified accountant from industry.
By the time their trainees qualify they will be expected to be running audits etc and this is what you would be up against.

I qualified at PwC, moved to industry and then looked into moving back to practice a couple of years later. I was advised against it from PwC but had an offer from a regional firm (South Wales). I turned this down and kept in industry, I'm now a FD and have earned more in my career than I would have in practice - there are very few people who make it to the mega bucks in practice and most accounts are on decent but not fantastic pay. You have more opportunities to progress in industry tbh.

Look at regional practices where you are and get a meeting arranged with a partner to see what their thoughts are

JohnDorian

I don’t see the point in moving to a big 4 to do audit after you qualify. 

For what you are trying to achieve by getting into advisory, it would have been easier to train in audit and then move on. You may want to look at career paths related directly to your FP&A and commercial finance background.

burner04

I was at EY for 9 years before jumping ship into internal audit at various large companies (E.On, npower, tarmac, national grid and the like). Wouldn’t want to go back into external audit in practice as the work life balance was horrendous compared to cushy industry roles.