Are you looking to start a promising career in accounting, but you don’t know where to start? If so, you aren’t alone. An accounting professional offers a lot of advancement and growth potential. Not to mention, it comes with excellent salaries and a flexible work environment in a lot of cases. You get to expand into numerous roles as you progress in your career. How do you get started? Here are some of the best tips you can use when you are looking to start your professional career as an accountant in the United Kingdom.
Tips to Get Started:
1. Consider Your Wants
One of the main things you need to do in the early stages is figuring out what you want from your finance and accounting jobs. You need to think about the type of accountant you want to be. What are you interested in? Think about your long-term career ambitions. Are you looking at becoming a tax accountant or do you want to get more into auditing? Is your long-term goal to become a chartered accountant?
There are a lot of options available for those who want to be in accounting. You have plenty of flexibility in care choice and the experience you gain from any position can be valuable elsewhere if you decide to move in a different direction.
2. Get Some Accountancy Qualifications
Once you’ve decided on what career path you want to take, you need to start getting some qualifications. No matter what route you end up going with, you need to start with the Association of Accounting Technicians or the AAT. This is usually the first step you’d take to get into the field and it’s how you want to start. From there, you can move on different paths depending on where you want to take your career. If you decide you want to get chartered, you’ll need to pass the ACCA exam.
If you have earned your degree in accounting or finance, you may qualify for some exemptions for the course/exam.
3. Choose A Specialty
If you are going to be looking to pursue a profession in the accounting field, you’ll want to choose a specialization. You want to choose where you want to specialize further to advance your career. These can include financial institutions, management, tax, or even forensic accounting. There are even further ways to specialize inside of these. You want to figure out what area you are most interested in to suit your goals.
4. Find a Job
You need to find a job or a way to gain experience. It could be something like an apprenticeship or something else. You just want to get some kind of experience in the field. You want to get some level of training to get real-world experience. It can be a major boost to your resume. It’s a good way to build up your skills and manufacture valuable experience that you can leverage into other positions. A lot of firms will even allow you to study for qualifications while you complete an apprenticeship or even work full-time. It also means you get to earn money while you study and train.
5. Start Your Career
Once you’ve trained and done all of your requisite studies and gained some experience, it’s time to start applying for jobs and begin your career. You are now fully trained and ready to go to start working as a professional accountant. A professional accountant can work in either a private or public industry. Likewise, they can work for a small business, large business, or even for themselves. You get a lot of flexibility when it comes to your working environment and working conditions making it a good professional for anyone.
