For many people with accounting skills and knowledge, following an accounting career path that leads to professionalism for example becoming a member of ACCA, CPA or CIMA is their life long goal but the spiraling number of accountants that are jobless and broke nowadays is worrying.
I have been asked too many times that I can remember if accountants can become successful entrepreneurs and my standard answer is, if we accountants can fluently speak the language of business, then there is no reason why accountants cannot become billionaires in a honest way.
We recently had a debate of whether to become streetwise after graduating as an accountant and start making money using our accounting skills or go after getting a job and subsequently take some professional accounting certification.
The debate was interesting that I decide to make this short post just to share some of the salient points that were made during the argument.
One of the most important points that I picked up from that thought provoking argument is that accountants can make great entrepreneur because they have all the rudiment of both established and small businesses but, tend to lack that entrepreneurial spirit.
This is not because there are no enough entrepreneurship courses in the accounting curricular. I vividly remember taking two semester course on entrepreneurship in my 3rd year of undergraduate accounting course.
We got to a point where we all tend to agree that accounting as a profession only attracts people that are melancholic in nature and people that prefer to deal with managerial risks from the outside rather than get fully involved.
Accountants prefer to employ economic tools while advising managers and business owners but tend not to use what they know to go into business for themselves and make some real money.
Think of it, accounting major and business administration major take similar subjects while studying at the university but most people that studies business administration end up setting up a business of theirs rather than take up employment as professional business administrators.
We also looked at other professionals like lawyers. We again somehow concluded that most lawyers set up a practice of their own after briefly working for someone. Apart from business law and contract law courses that have some elements of economics, every other courses that are taught at law school all revolve around the ingredients of law.
You can imagine our frustration. You go to school, sometimes borrow money just to graduate only to find you either unemployed or under employed. We shared a total of £231,987 worth of debt- all thanks to student loans.
Well, enough of this moaning, time to get down to business. The reason am posting this is to find out what it is that make qualified accountants shy away from venturing into the world of entrepreneurism.
I for once will never completely agree that the accounting training is the sole culprit of this heart breaking fact that accountants don’t go into business as much as they should be.
Pride and ego have massive role to play in this. We all worry about what our loved ones will say about us when we decide to start something small after investing so much money and time in our accounting education.
A very important question to ask that every accountant should ask him or herself at this point is, do we start our own business and make money doing the things that we love or do we stick with an accounting career path that we have always dreamed of? If we truly understand the importance of accounting, then we will know that it is make the world a better place. Let us all think like accountants and do what is right.
Well done if you have read this far, I just need you to do one more thing for me. Just leave your comment below.
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