To Account or not to Account

I am in a quandary. I did well in my accounting courses, was interested in it, still have an interest in tax issues, what’s going on with accounting standards, etc. Tax is one of the rare fields where pretty much every single person is affected by it. It appeals to my interest in politics, history, and how things work.
But I seem to have a really hard time making the jump from school to the “real world.”
Some of that is because the work you do as a new accountant is basically data entry clerical work. It’s more important to have a strong working knowledge of tax preparation software than anything else. The person who goes the farthest in the early stages of their career is the person who is best at knowing how the software works. I am not that person.

I continue to apply to firms. Public accounting is not really what I want to do. It’s one of those things that people put up with for a few years until they get enough experience to go someplace else. My wife just found a job, and that makes me want to get a job even more. I don’t want to be the slacker husband, although at least I'm probably going to still be collecting unemployment for a while. I’m interested in the IRS, but that will bring with it a whole new area of stress. I’ve interviewed with them twice over the last year and have a pretty good idea of the problems associated with being a revenue agent—pressure to close cases, uncooperative taxpayers and their representatives, and a ton of bureaucracy. Good benefits, though!

Recently heard from yet another former co-worker. Apparently the Big Firm had a massive bloodbath right before Thanksgiving. I was surprised at some of the names of those let go, they were people I knew were sharp and who always had a lot of work. I assume what happened is that the firm has lost so many clients that there was no longer anything for them to do. They expect the firm to cut more after April 15, and a lot of this year’s class of new hires are afraid they will be fired before they finish their first year [important to do this in order to qualify for the CPA license, otherwise you can’t get licensed until you complete a year of experience.]

Anyway, enough of that for now. Next time…Library Book Saturday!

My Big Mistake at the Big Firm, Part Three

It is probably best to wait until I get some kind of readership before doing these multi-part posts. It is like making a series of movies that no one wants to see.
Oh well, hopefully by the time people start really looking at this I will have several other posts at the top so maybe they will interested enough in what I'm doing to read all this.

I freely admit a lot of the problems at the Big Firm were of my own making. I am a bad networker. I suppose I feel that if I wanted to be a salesperson, I would have gone into sales. But I’ve learned the hard way that a lot of life involves sales in one sense or another. All I really can do is be friendly and treat people with respect. Being outgoing, well, that is a stretch. Not impossible, but not something that comes naturally. And not something that I am able to do regularly. I had a list of nine or ten people that I felt comfortable asking for work. It has to be said that most of the work I did get involved clerical tasks such as copying, putting together documents, and so on. That’s fine. I hate when people have the attitude that they are too good for something.

What was frustrating was that none of this work ever seemed to develop into anything more substantial. It was seven months into my job before I actually got involved in putting together a tax return, and unfortunately I just didn’t have a good idea about what to do. Intellectually I knew how it worked, but had a hard time navigating the various software packages, etc. They had a training, but it was just that, one training. Their way of doing things is basically, we’ll give a training but after that you are expected to more or less know how to do something. You’re allowed maybe one or two slip-ups, but after that you better show immediate improvement or that’s it. I usually need a lot of repetition in order to learn anything, and a lot of time work was really intermittent, so I took too long to improve. Business is not like school and I understand that you can't sacrifice the project for the sake of employee development, but I found it really difficult.

I made the classic rookie mistake of not asking for help. Towards the end of *my* busy season [I was not really involved in the process after mid-March since they didn’t really trust me any longer] I improved somewhat, but I guess it wasn’t enough. I’m hoping that is a lesson I can take to my next job, whenever that might be. Ask for help! You don’t have to go to someone every single time there’s an issue, but stay in contact. Maybe have a list of questions so you can get everything answered in an efficient manner.

I think that is something I would have had to learn no matter where I worked, but I do think had I worked someplace else I might have been given more of a chance to put what I had learned into action. Seniors apparently got tired of dealing with me, and a lot of my work was given to, yep, interns.

I spent roughly the last four months of my job not being assigned to anything. I knew I was in trouble, but my various inquiries regarding work went unanswered. My days were spent surfing the Web and doing technical trainings online. It got extremely boring after a while. Some people like the idea of a job where they don't really do anything, but I found it very demoralizing.

I began saving e-mails and documents in case I had to defend an unemployment claim [ALWAYS save everything that might help you with this. Pay stubs, e-mails from leadership about how things are going, e-mails regarding your performance, anything else that you can use in case they say you were fired due to misconduct.] Of course, if you are in a state where you can’t get unemployment if you’re terminated, you’re probably out of luck. Thankfully, in California you can get unemployment if they let you go for being bad at your job. We would have been in even bigger trouble otherwise, and most likely I would be writing this from my parents' home because we would have been in foreclosure by now.

The last few weeks were very odd. I knew that something was going to happen soon, and as I went into the month of June I often thought to myself, I am in the final days of my being here. All of the paperwork for the year-end reviews had been submitted. They had a committee who reviewed each employee’s file to determine how well they did. My lease was up at the end of June and I asked my coach if I could learn the results of the review as soon as I could so I could give notice to my landlord in case the result was not a good one [I did not say this, but I was operating under the assumption that it would not be.] The last day of the month began like my usual day...

My Big Mistake at the Big Firm, Part Two

I was thirty-five when I started at the Big Firm. In other words, I was usually about twelve years older than most of my fellow new hires. I was about ten years older than most of the senior staff that were directly above me. I was about the same age as a lot of the directors—senior manager types who usually had at least a decade of experience. I was actually older than a few of them. Age is just a number, right? Yes and no. And though age is not the only reason for my failure at the Big Firm, I think it is a major underlying reason for a lot of the issues I encountered.

It’s probably due to immaturity, but I generally did not see myself as being older than my co-workers, that is, it was not something I really thought much about on a regular basis.
Nor was it something that they brought up regularly, I think only a couple of times and even then it was more a case of wanting to know what I did before I came to the firm.

One of the main problems I had there was networking. Networking is the lifeblood of big organizations. If you can’t do it, if you can’t “put yourself out there,” you will not be able to find work, and soon your career will be on life support as mine was the last three or four months of my tenure. Unfair or not, people tend to associate with those who are similar to themselves. Most of the groups at my former job generally involved people who had gone to school together, partied together, played sports together, and so on. I did not have that type of connection with anyone who could really help my career. I had a “coach,” a director who was supposedly my mentor, but he was unable to do much to help me find work. His area of expertise was very specialized. Only one other person was in his workgroup, a manager. They did not require anyone at my staff level. So he was not able to do much other than attempt to introduce me to people during my first couple of weeks. The rest of the time he would check in every so often and basically ask me why I had been unable to find work. The HR “scheduler” did the same thing. I was placed on one assignment which I was not able to accept because I had already committed myself to a project which I had found on my own. After that apparently I was on the scheduler’s bad list. Other than a couple of projects during busy season, she never placed me on anything else the rest of my time there. She would just occasionally harangue me about why I wasn’t finding work.

I guess I should explain the concept of “finding work,” because it is one that I had a lot of trouble with. Accounting is not like working in a blue collar job, or even most office jobs that I had in the past. You are on your own to find something to do, to get yourself assigned to a project. Never mind that you know no one there, and have no experience.
Never mind that you are competing with co-workers who have interned in the past and have began their full-time career with a pre-existing network of contacts who prefer to work with them instead of with an unknown element such as yourself [see why my not being an intern wound up being a huge disadvantage?]. You are expected to find work.
It is basically looking for a job at your job, and it is almost as frustrating as job searching is for the unemployed. Or at least, that was the way things were at the Big Firm. I understand that things work differently at smaller firms. I am hoping at some point I can find out for myself.

If I had began in 2006 or 2007, there probably would have been no problem finding work. With my usual timing, I began my career just as the recession began picking up steam. The Big Firm began losing clients to smaller, less expensive firms. The clients who remained wanted a price break. The end result was, much less work to go around.
The partners began to lose money. Perks were cut. Occasionally, an e-mail would go out from someone who was leaving. Others would leave involuntarily. This all began not long after I started, and I was about halfway through my year there when I had the realization that things were not going to work out.

I’m hoping this doesn’t come off as bitter. Some of it can’t be helped. Not everything was negative. A lot of what happened was more or less my fault too. I will think a bit more about it, and post again later.