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Tag: Is money all you care about?

Jim Turley Explains Why You Should Work at Ernst & Young Rather Than Facebook

JT spoke to NYU students earlier this week and of course during the Q&A, Diane Brady, a senior editor at Bloomberg threw him a softie, asking if the firm was hiring, to which Diego responded, “we’re always hiring.” This, of course brought the house down (laughs, raucous applause).

Anyway, Brady decided to throw Jim a curve and asked why a young recruit would pick E&Y over Zuckerland.

“Should students ever consider starting at a big firm of yours?” Brady said. “Why not just go out there and make the billions with Facebook? What is the attraction at Ernst & Young?”

Turley responded by saying that most entrepreneurs, despite common misconceptions, are not just out to make money.

“[Entrepreneurs] go out there to find a need,” he said. “At Ernst & Young, you have opportunities to be extraordinarily mobile and move around the world.”

His advice? “First, find something that you love doing,” Turley said. “Second, align with an organization that actually thinks about where the world is going. And lastly, find an organization that wants you to change them as opposed to them to change you.”

See, if you can’t find a need then you need care about being “extraordinarly mobile.” Seems like a fair trade-off, especially since billionaires don’t travel much.

And just curious, how would the members of Ernie’s army like the firm to change? We’re assuming JT goes with the “whatever is good for the goose” mantra. Leave your suggestions below.

Ernst & Young CEO speaks at Stern [WSN]

Accounting Salaries Are Dead Even; Is Big 4 Work Experience the Difference?

Last month we opened a thread on your salaries and your response was impressive. Just for fun, we found some poor soul to crunch some of the numbers so that we might share some information on the data we gathered.

We’ll start off with a post facing off the Big 4 salary against non-Big 4 salary. Here are the average salaries for each based on the data we collected:

• Non-Big 4 – $72,136

• Big 4 – $71,166


If you getting worked up over less than a $1,000 difference, then you’re more shrewd than we imagined. For the more reasonable of you, the discussion is, what are the unmentionables here? Both Big 4 and non-Big 4 firms have their advantages and many of you have made the jump from Big 4 to non-Big 4; non-Big 4 to Big 4; Big 4 to non-Big 4 back to Big 4, whatever.

A popular argument is that the Big 4 work experience is irreplaceable on a resumé but is it? Will potential employers really pick someone with a Big 4 background the majority of the time?

Most people would agree that auditing is auditing and the tax law is the same no matter where you work. Smaller firms have just a many unique clients as large firms so there’s experience to be gained everywhere.

Now before you start shouting, “if you want a job at a Fortune 500 company, blah, blah, blah” how many of those jobs are really out there? Enough so that everyone that has left a Big 4 firm will be able to find a job? Let’s not pretend we all have the same ambitions here.

Salaries for Accounting and Finance Jobs You May Want

Thumbnail image for money.jpgThe good folks at Accounting Principals (they’re your pals) and Parker & Lynch put out their salary guide for 2010 last week and we managed to pour through the thing as superficially as possible.
With that in mind we present to you the top five average base salaries at various levels as presented by the guide:
Accountants and Financial Personnel
• Senior Budget Analyst – $75,200
• Tax Accountant – $74,000
• Senior Financial Analyst – $72,900
• Senior Treasury Analyst – $72,400
• Senior Internal Auditor – $72,300
Supervisor
• Financial Reporting Supervisor – $80,400
• Tax Supervisor – $77,800
• Budgeting Supervisor – $77,300
• Auditing Supervisor – $73,600
• Cost Accounting Supervisor – $71,900


Mid-Level Managers
• Audit Manager – $109,300
• Tax Manager – $105,400
• Sarbanes Oxley Manager – $99,800
• Financial Analysis Manager – $99,500
• Financial Reporting Manager – $95,700
Executive and Senior Managers
• CFO – $329,600
• Finance Director – $210,600
• Treasurer – $183,900
• Top Audit Executive – $179,200
• Controller – $175,500
It’s pretty clear that the first big jump is at the manager level and then we see another even bigger jump at the executive/senior manager level. The guide doesn’t appear to include partner salary data which as it has been discussed, varies widely.
For anyone that’s looking for a job based primarily on salary (you know who you are), these positions may be the ones to look at first.
Abrashoff-Salary-Guide-2010.pdf