Principle
Hopefully at this point you’re making some solid progress in figuring out your career direction with what we’ve shared so far on creating a habit and process for personal reflection and giving you some thoughts on the debate about staying or going from public accounting.
We work with people every day making decisions one way or another on that last question, but we often find that there are a few things people commonly miss in their analysis of whether to stay or go.
Before we share some of those, we’d like to preface our comments by saying these things are not meant to be seen as necessarily positive or negative in any objective sense. The beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder on these points so make sure to apply your own thoughts to whether something is a net positive or negative for your preferences.
First, consider the environment you’re working in and the one you would be moving to. Is it fast-paced, deadline driven, high performance? Is it low key, low pressure? Are the people on your team driven, or is there a mix of people with different degrees of performance? Are you working in a somewhat homogeneous demographic environment (e.g. public accounting skews younger) and is there a big change waiting for you in this at the new environment? All of these things can have a dramatic impact on your work experience, and if you’ve only been in one context to this point in your career, there may be things like this you don’t even notice because it’s all you’ve ever known.
Similar to the performance environment above, public accounting work tends to offer greater variety and challenge in the work itself. Regardless of the position you take, you’re likely to be doing something materially different than what you were doing in public accounting so there will be an immediate challenge adjusting to the new things you’re doing. However, that element of challenge will dissipate within a few months. Is the work you’re doing and the organization you’re joining going to offer ways to keep you challenged and motivated? On the flip side, is having a challenge important to you in your work? Perhaps you’re ready for the known, stable and predictable environment. And maybe A LOT fewer hours.
A third significant difference is in the advancement path. There are few mysteries on this point in the world of public accounting. Once you move to industry, there are numerous ways to advance your career, and they’re not always obvious. You also have to take a much greater responsibility for figuring out those paths for yourself.
There are others, but if you spend the time to think through these additional elements of your next career step, you’ll be in a great shape to make the best decision for your career!
Practice
You’ve started your reflection habit, so now add these elements when you’re considering a career change. Like we’ve said before, write it down!
- Think through your work environment in terms of the team culture, intangible elements of the actual work, and how you can see your career evolving in any potential opportunities.
- You’ll likely have some gaps in your knowledge to fully answer these questions so look through your network and identify connections that might be able to help you fill in these gaps.
- Reach out to those connections!