When you told your friends and family, “I think I want to be an accountant,” some of them likely shot you a now-familiar blank stare, eyes glazed over at the thought of spending the next few minutes discussing your particularly mundane prospective career.
It turns out, they’re entirely wrong to assume what it is you’re qualified to do. There’s so much more to for graduates with backgrounds in accounting than number-crunching their way through piles of receipts. Here are 5 amazing accounting jobs that go well past the mundane expectations most mistakenly assign to the field:
- Entertainment Accountants are specialized professionals who learn the ins and outs of their chosen corner of the entertainment industry to best serve clients ranging from actors to entire studios. In an industry marked by complex relationships between unions, independent contractors, and byzantine international dealings, entertainment accountants provide the connective tissue that allows all these moving parts to function financially. And sometimes, their tasks take a turn towards the truly unexpected: Entertainment Accountants are responsible for tabulating votes for awards ceremonies, and keeping the results under wraps until the very moment a Hollywood star reads the winner to a national audience. Accounting firm PwC is responsible for over eighty years of Academy Awards ceremonies.
- FBI Agents are regularly faced with problems to solve and evidence to sort that lands purely in the realm of accounting. Crime, in most cases, is the result of a skewed perspective on economic incentive by bad actors, and it’s on law enforcement to untangle those factors within the fabric of a given case. Federal law enforcement tends to step into the biggest, most tangled messes too large or with confluence across to many locations for local police to handle. So believe it or not, one of the best routes to becoming a fed? A background in accounting.
- Public Officials from local treasurers to state senators find themselves consistently faced with accounting issues. The very concept of government in large part boils down to deciding how to use limited monetary resources in efficient, accountable ways. Lawmakers and their constituents create and vote on laws; public accountants maintain the flow of funds that allow those concepts to fully realize in material ways.
- Environmental Accountants apply the logic of accounting to the impact a business has on the environment. With companies like Apple leading the way, many corporate and public interests apply environmental accounting to build systems of best practices that allow continued growth while minimizing negative environmental contributions. Far from the classic, uninformed image of a corporate accountant largely looking for tax loopholes, Environmental Accountants wield their knowledge of finance and the law to help businesses better integrate with the natural world around them.
- IT Specialists are known mostly for networking knowledge, but backgrounds in accounting provide a massive advantage for those looking to lead departments. While the average IT guy knows how to keep infrastructure running, accounting-focused IT Specialists build and maintain efficient databases that serve as the core of a major corporation. There is high demand for these specialists, especially for consulting work to mitigate the issues that inevitably emerge from the standard collaboration between IT and accounting specialists who tend to exhibit a level of disconnect.
Accounting experience leads to opportunities well beyond tax day. It’s more than learning the ins and outs of the IRS; accounting is a system of financial logic that immediately puts you above and beyond the expectations of entry-level work in countless fields. So, the next time someone gives you that empty stare when you tell them what you’re studying set them straight on what accounting really means in the job marketplace!
If you’re looking for a placement that uses your accounting degree and experience in interesting ways, don’t hesitate to contact us.
