Principle
Hi and welcome to the first edition of our blog that we’re calling “Paths from Public.” We’ll give you a bit of background, explain who this is for, what you can expect, and a key point to help you on your journey.
By way of background, Wilson James is a recruitment firm started by a CPA in July 2018 (just now celebrating 4 years in business!). We’ve evolved in that time from a generalist finance and accounting recruitment firm, to specialists in public accounting to public accounting recruitment, and now, focusing on helping those in public accounting make the transition to interesting careers outside of public accounting.
So first, hopefully this describes you pretty well or at least did at one point: you’re in a public accounting career and you’ve either planned for a career outside of public accounting or at least think you might at some point.
We’ll keep the format the same for as long as it makes sense to do so where we can provide you with value. We’ll have an original piece of content we’re going to call the “Principle”, followed by some thoughts to put the principle into “Practice”, and close with a couple of curated links we think would be helpful to explore more deeply.
With all that said, the key first step in any path outside of public accounting is to cultivate personal reflection into your career.
We’ve observed from our daily conversations that the first job in public accounting is actually the end of a planning arc that started in high school that goes something like this: figure out college major, get accepted to college and an accounting program, land first job in audit or tax.
So what’s next and how do you figure out which of the myriad paths are right for you? Self reflection is one of the most helpful habits you can develop to help figure that out.
Practice
Cultivating a Habit of Self-Reflection
- Schedule it – self reflection in the random moments of life when inspiration strikes or the right chain of neurons fire in your brain don’t lead to lasting insight. Most of us don’t do the things we don’t schedule so the first step is to schedule a time for self reflection. The frequency is less important than that you set aside the time to do it.
- Document it – digital or analog, you do you. Just make sure it’s documented so that you can refer back to it over it time.
We have some great resources below to help you structure your reflection to make it really easy to develop this into a habit for life.
Not just for year-end but 10 good questions to think about!
Exercises and questions to think about
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