Accountancy

Slippin Jimmy

Hi,
I was thinking of doing accountancy after my leaving. How many points do I need to go to colledge to study for it? Someone said that I could get a type of apprenticeship at it, can I? What would be your average wage for a beginner.
I would appriciate some feedback on this.
Thanks

kluivert

There are a number of routes that you can take in order to become a qualified accountant.

There was a post recently in this forum about this. Have a look.

In the meantime....

As a school leaver you can enter the professional, join an accounting body just as the ACCA or ICAI or CPA or CIMA(Management accounting).

Each body has a number of exams over a number of levels. When you complete all these exams and complete a work experience record you will be qualified.

I am an ACCA Student working in Practice so check out www.accaglobal.com for more info. There are other students who are with ICAI (ACA) so you should decide which body is best for me before starting off.

If you go straight into practice after soon the money will not be good, when you leave uni or college the money will not be great but at least you will have a degree and this will better your chances of getting the bigger and better jobs.

You can do an accounting degree....the benefit of this is that you gain more knowledge of boarder aspects to accounting as well as finance. Plus on completion of a degree you will get exemptions of most of the professional accounting bodies exams. For example i went to DKIT because they offer the highest exemptions in Ireland for students wanting to join ACCA. Points for DKIT was around 350 and that was back in 2001.

You need to speak to your career guidance teacher, or ring the big 4 and ask for advice of them - they set the standards in this industry and thus they should give you a very good benchmark to aim at.

Good luck with studies.

Carb

Hi,

There are probably that many advantages and disadvantages to the different routes, it would be hard to cover them all.

Personally, I went into training straight after my Leaving Cert. It was a small practice, but sometimes this can be the best way to learn the basics. The primary thing you should focus on is what experience can you get. For me, this meant quite a lot of job hopping, but I was always able to show in interviews that I was looking to gain new experience. You must remember that once you have your prof. qualification it becomes pretty much a level playing field, and it wil be your practical experience that counts.

What is sometime forgotten also, is that it isn't just a case of getting your exams, you also need three years relevant experience to get qualified. This means that if you do four years a college, although you may be exaemp from a lot of the professional exams, you still have three years work experience to do, whereas the person who started after their leaving cert could be qualified.

The advantage of having a degree is that it will open the doors to the top 20 practices and multinational companies. There are obvious benefits to this, the biggest one been the name on your CV. However, you will hear stories about the lack of experience gained in the big 4, generally because you can become focused on one small area. You can always work your way up to the big companies if that is what you want. As I said, I started in a small practice, but I am now working in a 1.5 billion a year company. The word degree was never mentioned.

Its probable tyhe next person who posts here will have a completely different opinion, and that is really the secret to making the right decision. Talk to as many people as possible, listen to their experiences and career paths and this will help you.

In terms of salary, its been a while since I started, but it would probably range between low to mid teens for somebody straight after their LC, to a max of 25K for someone with a degree.

I hope this helps some.