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Just What the Accounting Industry Needs, Another Article About How Great the Job Market Is

Posted on by Adrienne Gonzalez

Not sure if you guys heard but the economy kind of sucks. In fact, it's kind of sucked for going on a few years now but many of you would have no idea just how bad it is because the unemployment rate in accounting is so low that all you really need to get a job is a degree and a pulse. Heck, forget the degree, they're even taking DeVry grads these days.

Anyhoo, we've seen countless articles over these lean, frightening years about how great the job market is in accounting, so many that the people who read those kinds of articles in 2008 have already graduated and are flooding the job market as we speak. I spoke to many of these people in my CPA review days, especially in 2009 and 2010, who went back to school for an accounting degree due to making a poor career choice earlier in their lives by becoming realtors, mortgage brokers, bankers or online tabloid writers (oh wait…never mind). Out of a job with little prospects, many of these people decided it would be cool to be an accountant because, well, they like the idea of paying bills and not living out of their cars.

But what's going to happen to all these people piling into accounting because that's where the jobs are in a few years when the economy really turns around? Will they stay? Will they go back to whatever it was they did before? Will they even make it that far?

The tricky thing here is that this industry is not for everyone. As I have said before, I could never do it, even though I like it enough to write about it (writing = right-brained activity/ticking and tying = left-brained activity). I have no desire to do it. I'd be terrible at it and am morally opposed to working any job that sucks out my soul, which seems to be the consensus from many of you. So how many of these refugees from other industries pursuing accounting degrees give up halfway through once they realize bean counting isn't nearly as fun as Sesame Street made it seem and there's a lot more to the job than just learning a few ASCs and knowing what to do with a Schedule C?

Well, the Baltimore Business Journal and the National Association of Colleges and Employers have added yet another "OMG YOU GUYZ THEREZ JOBS IN ACCOUNTING" article to the mix, which is great because obviously there haven't been enough of them over the last FOUR years. If only the economy would just hurry up and get better, everyone could go back to doing what they love and we wouldn't have to read this same article every few weeks:

Here’s a list from the National Association of Colleges and Employers on the top 10 bachelor’s degrees in demand for the Class of 2013:

  1. Finance
  2. Computer and information science
  3. Accounting
  4. Business administration/management
  5. Mechanic engineering
  6. Management information systems
  7. Electric engineering
  8. Computer engineering
  9. Marketing/marketing management
  10. Economics

Now, is there high demand for accountants? Duh. Dodd-Frank alone could keep 75% of you in a job for the next four decades. But accounting cannot employ everyone, plus there's the whole issue of some people not being cut out for this stuff. The CPA exam should keep some of them from doing more than AP clerking it until the economy improves but is the AICPA preparing for this flood of accounting grads bursting forth from higher education as we speak? Does the CPA exam need to be harder to weed out some of these "well screw it I guess I'll become an accountant" people? Do we need to install a border fence to keep them from hopping over on the realtor/mortgage broker/banker side?

Where's the breaking point? There's no way this can go on like this forever, there just aren't enough chairs for all those warm bodies.

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Job of the Day: The OC Is Calling

Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for hire me2.jpgIf we knew anything about reality TV maybe we would throw in a quip about Laguna Beach/The Hills/whatever the hell those shows are called nowadays but we don’t. The allure of weather that isn’t Biblical should be enough pique your interest.
Check out the details for a Pricing Manager position at PIMCO in Newport Beach, CA after the jump.


Company: PIMCO
Title: Pricing Manager
Location: Newport Beach, CA
Minimum experience: 2 – 5 years
Description: PIMCO Pricing is primarily responsible for oversight of security valuation of PIMCO’s mutual funds and private trusts advised and administered by PIMCO. The group works closely with third-party vendors (fund accountants/administrators, custodians, auditors and security pricing vendors) that provide services to the funds/trusts.
Responsibilities: Interact with the pricing vendors in order to price additional securities PIMCO owns; Communicate daily inquiries to appropriate internal departments; Manage various projects related to process improvements, procedures and systems development; Maintains current knowledge of domestic and foreign securities markets and monitors effects on funds and pricing and valuation procedures; Develop reports for PIMCO funds, the Boards, Legal, and Portfolio Management
Required Skills: Candidate will have two to five years of professional work experience in mutual fund operations, broker/dealer back-office or mutual fund auditor. Solid understanding of operational controls, processes, procedures.
See the entire description over at the GC Career Center and visit the main page for all your job search needs.

The Scam That Accounting Education Isn’t

I complain about a lot of things in the industry that I probably should be grateful for instead: Sarbanes-Oxley, the PCAOB, the IASB and the AICPA Board of Examiners… the list goes on. I’ve done my fair share of complaining about accounting education as well (even offending some by implying professors were cheap and lazy though I certainly did not mean all or even most accounting professors) but I think it’s safe for us to say that we have it a lot better than some other professions. Like law.


Check out Critical Mass on the law school scam (the entire thing is recommended reading):

Over the years, I wrote countless law school recommendations and very, very few grad school recommendations. I never worried too much about the ones who were law school-bound–the students I worried about were the ones who decided to go for PhD’s in English. Grad school in the humanities is a scam. There are simply no jobs, tenure is disappearing, the culture of the academic humanities is pathological, and the sort of academic life grad students hope to acquire is ceasing to exist. But law school, I felt, was a safe bet–and would also offer its own variety of intellectual thrill. Who wouldn’t want to learn to think with the precision, capaciousness, originality, and historical-mindedness that the law requires? It’s beautiful and powerful and very, very useful. When done well, it’s applied scholarship, scholarship with decisiveness and impact.

But bubbles are bursting everywhere we look these days. Last month I posted about how Loyola’s law school is cooking transcripts to give its grads a leg up on the job market. Now comes word of widespread cynical profiteering at the expense of students’ futures.

Accounting education doesn’t appear to be so neatly packaged as the debt factory that law is, nor does it seem to produce too many rats to fit in our particular race. Sure, there are plenty of unequipped idiots who get through (shouldn’t professors exist to weed these out if education is, in fact, meant for the greater good of our economy and not just to create more perpetual debt?) but that happens in any profession, no more in accounting than elsewhere as far as I can tell.

Do a Google search on the law school scam and you’ll get pages upon pages of results. Do one on the accounting education scam and you’ll get one question about DeVry’s accounting program (I won’t say a word). Does that mean accounting is any better off?

Somewhere between this depressing March 2010 report from CPA Trendlines on how actual firms held up through the recession in 2009, and the rosy reports from hijacked media like CNN about how great the industry is handling this mess, lies the truth. Some areas are better than others and some accounting grads just don’t deserve a job. With the firms lining up the lawyers instead of the staff, you can bet the days of skating your way through 2 years of easy work experience are pretty much over.

Hopefully this means fewer unqualified future accountants being pushed through accounting programs that will soon be starving for qualified educators and better prospects for the bright, talented future CPAs who actually deserve a job in this industry.