Who would be a Chartered Accountant anyway?

So this week the IFRS Accountant was asked if they would recommend someone becoming a Chartered Accountant in the UK.

The response was yes, but....

Artificial Intelligence

First there was the outsourcing of accounting functions and processes to lower cost economies and now industry has moved on to eliminating these functions and processes entirely through the use of artificial intelligence.

There are generally sound commercial reasons why this will continue such that a number of accounting roles, if not already made obsolete, will be obsolete soon enough. These days purchase and sales ledger staff are an endangered species and financial analysts are likely to soon go the way of the dodo.

Chartered Accountants have to date been only marginally affected by this trend but the big auditing firms are now embracing artificial intelligence in a big way to reduce risk by directly analysing their clients financial systems and taking the human element out of a lot of work they do.

This means they are recruiting fewer staff, meaning fewer future Chartered Accountants, with the work that they  being more focused on reviewing the results of artificial intelligence algorithms.

Back when the IFRS Accountant was training to be an accountant, being good at maths and computing were seen as being beneficial but not really necessary to become a Chartered Accountant.

Today, the world is very different and those skills are absolutely essential – if you don’t like computers or maths then becoming a Chartered Accountant will be 10x harder.

Do you really want to be an auditor for 3 years?

For most people, the only way to become a Chartered Accountant is to join an audit firm under a 3 year training contract.

If you don’t know what auditors do then firstly Google it and imagine a job where your customers seem to provide you with as much training experience as the firm you work for, where your customers don’t want you be there and find you a general annoyance who distract them from their normal everyday work duties ...and you don’t do any actual accounting.

And the environment you work in is hellish with very long working hours and a dog-eat-dog environment as there will be intense competition for a job at the end of the 3 year training contract.

But the pay is good and the career prospects once you have qualified are absolutely worth it..!

Life after auditing?

The IFRS Accountant never wanted to be an auditor for their career and whilst they did enjoy the job for a number of years after qualifying, this was only to get sufficient experience for a move into industry.

IFRS Accounting

To become an expert in IFRS Accounting Standards like the IFRS Accountant you either need to move into the technical accounting department of the audit firms or move into Industry.

Whilst the IFRS Accountant has the greatest respect for IFRS specialists working in the audit firms, they can tend to be disconnected from the realities of business in that IFRS Accounting Standards cannot always provide the answer as to how to account for a transaction that was never envisioned when the standard was written.

So yes, but...

... the big but is that to become a Chartered Accountant you will have to survive 3 years of being an auditor, working insane hours with people who will happily stab you in the back if it means getting a job on the auditor merry-go-round at the end or you intend to leave and go into industry at that point.