As the business community adapts to a changing landscape due to the evolution of the startup and gig economies, so too has the field of accounting.
“A lot more kids are going into accounting these days,” said Mark Mottel, a certified public accountant for more than 30 years and partner with the White Plains-based accounting, tax and consulting firm Citrin Cooperman.
“There was a period of time where no one wanted to be an accountant, they all wanted to be investment bankers, and when the economy went south they realized maybe that”™s not the greatest place to be,” he said.
Frederick Harmon, a visiting professor of accounting at the University of Bridgeport”™s Ernest C. Trefz School of Business, has seen the increase in student interest in accounting firsthand.
The accounting program at Bridgeport University has seen a significant increase in the number of students taking the major. According to the university, from 2010 to 2015 the number of undergraduates majoring in accounting grew by 43 percent and almost doubled for graduate level majors ”” growing by 95 percent.
That”™s a sharp contrast to student interest in accounting during the boom years of the dot-com and investment finance bubbles prior to the recession, Harmon said.
“After the recession, the whole go-go, finance major, make a lot of money, get-in get-out era is over,” he said. “The accounting profession is kind of making a comeback.”
Interest in the profession never truly disappeared as it has always provided a broad foundation for essential business skills, said Jeffry Haber, an accounting professor at Iona College”™s Hagan School of Business.
“It is a good basis for many other professions,” Haber said. “If you scour the C-suites at a lot of corporations you see accounting tends to be a pretty good background for moving up.”
Headcounts in accounting classes are increasing at Iona as well, Haber said.
Harmon notes that it”™s not just the reliability of the field that is drawing students, but the array of applications the profession has as it expands to meet evolving demands in the private sector and beyond.
“If you want to work for the FBI, the number one hire that they have is people with accounting backgrounds,” he said. “They are doing white-collar crime, data analytics, money laundering all that type of stuff which requires a high degree of accounting sophistication.”
Harmon said the expansion of accounting skills beyond traditional roles is something he expects will only continue as the country rebounds from the Great Recession with a greater emphasis on entrepreneurship.
“The accountant is becoming less and less of a debit-and-credit type of a guy and more and more of someone who is a partner in the business, no matter what it is,” he said.
The perception of desirability and loyalty to the old-guard of corporations is waning and being replaced with the innovative spirit of the entrepreneur, said Bruce Bachenheimer, clinical professor of management at Pace University and executive director of the school”™s entrepreneurship lab.
“A very large percentage of students say they are interested in starting their own company or working at a startup as opposed to the previous generation before, where the goal was to get a job with a big name company,” he said. “Partially that is because of all the changes we have seen in the economy, but also these students have seen their parents laid-off and unemployed and looking for other work, so I think there has been a shift in the mentality.”
In the world of entrepreneurs, the role of accounting has moved beyond bookkeeping to one of critical importance as a strategic role in a company”™s positioning for future growth, he said.
Startups looking to raise outside funds from angel and venture investors or who have their eyes on going public or being acquired must manage their books in a tactical way from the get-go, he said.
“The last thing you want to do when you are looking to raise angel money, venture capital money and then ultimately to be acquired or to do an IPO is to have backwards books where you really didn”™t know what you were doing and kept a bunch of receipts in a shoebox,” he said.
Part of the increased draw to accounting is due in part to changing work habits brought by the slow takeover of millennials in the workforce ”” what Heather Ziegler, Stamford managing partner for the international financial services firm Deloitte, refers to as a generational workforce shift.
According to Ziegler, more than half of Deloitte”™s employees fit in the millennial category of 25- to 35-year-olds and these hires are being driven by rapidly developing technology.
In particular, the company is seeing the changing role of technology in advisory services as well as in specialized fields like data analytics, statistics, audit and tax services and even cybersecurity, she said.
“We are leveraging tech and using more analytics to be able to focus on more complex areas,” she said.
All this has led to broader backgrounds for accountants, but also a more difficult career field, said Mottel of Citrin Cooperman.
“Business is more complicated these days, it”™s multinational, multistate. It is harder to do the work than it was 20 years ago for sure,” he said. “There is a lot more regulation in accounting today ”” financial statement requirements for public companies, bank requirements ”” there is a lot more that has to go into the preparation of a statement which in turn requires more skills and education.”
He expects that as more people leap into entrepreneurship they will find that accounting skills are the bedrock of any successful venture.
“More and more people are trying to venture out on their own,” he said. “Not many make it, and they probably don”™t make it because one of the first things they skimp on is accounting.”
