The content on this page is taken from Career Paths in Accounting , a CD-ROM containing career video interviews with accountants and an interactive test which will recommend a job area for you. Public Accounting Firms Skills and Requirements Accounting offers superb career opportunities in many different contexts. Accountants engage in a wide variety of activities besides preparing financial statements and recording business transactions including computing costs and efficiency gains from new technologies, participating in strategies for mergers and acquisitions, quality management, developing and using information systems to track financial performance, tax strategy, and health care benefits management. The field of accounting offers stimulating and challenging work that is constantly evolving. Because accountants spend a lot of time looking under the hoods of businesses they really learn how business works.
Accounting is very team-oriented.
You will usually start as a junior member of a team responsible for auditing an important account or preparing financial statements. It is important then that you enjoy working as part of a team and that you learn to do so in your education. The field of accounting has seen constant technological and intellectual innovation in recent decades. Firms are implementing new electronic systems for submitting and preparing financial statements. And ways of tracking costs have improved with the introduction of techniques such as activitity-based costing.