Accountants Round Up

"Women Urged to Strive for More Leadership at Firms"

By Liz Gold: "Not everybody has to like me." This statement is a solution to the first of seven deadly sins of career management, as explained during a keynote at the Forum for Women in Accounting, a three-day confab that has attracted approximately 250 participants.

The first sin, according to Kathleen Grace, founder of Grace Consulting Services, a professional services firm specializing in executive assessment, executive coaching and strategic succession planning, is "wanting to be liked vs. respected."

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Source: WebCPA, 19 June 2008. © 2007 WebCPA and SourceMedia, Inc. All rights reserved.

Help a Young Career

By Bill Kennedy: "Here is what you should know if you want to get ahead . . . "

Did anyone ever take you aside and say those words to you? Me neither. Yet it used to happen all the time, back when people stayed in one company long enough that there was time to plan for the future. The older executive would take the new recruit aside and teach them the subjects that they never got in school: how to work within the system, how to form alliances, how to help one another other climb the corporate ladder.

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Source: Energized Accounting, 4 May 2008. © 2008 Energized Accounting. All rights reserved.

"Staying Top of Mind"

By John Jantsch: It’s a pretty accepted fact that finding ways to do more business or get more referrals from your existing customers is a smart way to build a business. But as the din of noisy demands captures your attention it’s easy to forget all about those existing customers until they pick-up the phone and reorder.

I advocate creating a calendar of contacts and finding a way to make certain that your customers, referral sources and hottest prospects never go more than about 30 days without some form of contact. These contacts don’t, in fact shouldn’t, always have to be overt sales attempts. I adopted a practice long ago of picking up the phone on Friday afternoons and reaching out to people I felt I hadn’t talk with in a while just to see how they were. It never failed, however, to turn up some opportunities.

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Source: Duct Tape Marketing, 25 April 2008. © 2008 Jantsch Communications. All rights reserved.

"What Will it Take to be a Top CPA in 2010?"

By AccountingWEB: These days, a number of factors are combining to make Certified Public Accountants more valued in the current marketplace than ever before - with even brighter prospects for the most qualified and skilled professionals in the foreseeable future.

Looking back, the number of accounting majors in major universities fell steadily for more than 10 years following the adoption of increased education requirements for CPA candidates in the late 1980s.

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Source: AccountingWEB, 28 January 2008. Copyright © 2008 AccountingWEB, Inc. All rights reserved.

"In the Hot Seat"

By Allison Enright: More than 40,000 accounting degrees were awarded at the undergraduate level in 2003-2004, according to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), and that number has been growing steadily since Sarbanes-Oxley came down in 2002. But not everyone finds, or wants, a home in traditional areas of the profession like public or corporate accounting, despite the enticements warranted by the fact that demand for talent far outweighs supply.

According to the AICPA, in 2004 77 percent of accounting graduates accepted accounting or auditing positions upon graduation, and 17 percent went into tax.

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Source: Insight Magazine, January/February 2008. Copyright © 2007, Illinois CPA Society. All rights reserved.

"First Year Experience - Life in the Big Four"

By Anita Chan: Anita Chan joined KPMG last year upon graduating from a five-year master's program (in four years) at the University of Southern California. Anita is now an audit associate in KPMG's Los Angeles office.

When I graduated from the University of Southern California about a year and a half ago, there were many things that I couldn't have predicted about my current position as a second-year associate in KPMG's audit practice.

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Source: AccountingWEB, 8 January 2008. Copyright © 2008 AccountingWEB, Inc. All rights reserved.

"Report Reveals Career Priorities of Gen Y"

By SmartPros: Research from Robert Half International and Yahoo! HotJobs reveals that "millennials" share many of the same concerns as more tenured workers when it comes to saving for retirement, finding a solid healthcare plan and achieving work-life balance. However, Gen Y workers aren’t concerned only with the benefits their employers provide. They also expect a lot from their company leaders and look to them as partners in success and job satisfaction.

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Source: SmartPros, 7 January 2008. © 2008 SmartPros Ltd. All rights reserved.

"Youth Will be Served!"

By Liz Gold: Want to know how to encourage younger people to stay at your firm?

Re-assess their supervisory relationships.

It may sound simplistic, but the lack of day-to-day management interaction is one of the major issues that younger, less experienced people face when entering a new working environment - i.e., supervisors or managers who are too hands-off.

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Source: WebCPA, 7 January 2008. © 2007 WebCPA and SourceMedia, Inc. All rights reserved.

"5 Interviewing Tips NEVER to Forget!"

By Chris Marston: I am always shocked a how poor a job law students do interviewing with law firms! Although there is no excuse for attorneys to lack independent thinking, I have a suspicion that law schools are not doing their part in preparing students to set themselves apart from the rest. I'm quite sure that it does not help that law schools and students alike believe that big firms are looking for the same cookie-cutter qualities in each person. In this competitive market, candidates cannot afford to blend into the mix. In this blog I wanted to share some the tips we have for attorneys who are applying to a law firms that they should NEVER forget:

1 - Differentiate Yourself!!

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Source: Inside Firm of the Future, 18 September 2007.

"Attraction of Flexible Working Ignored by HR"

By Nic Paton: Nearly nine out 10 workers will go for jobs that offer flexible or remote working when it comes to choosing a new employer. Yet just half of HR professionals rate this as something important that their organisations should be offering.

A survey by recruitment giant Monster has found work-life balance, particularly flexi-time and telecommuting, to be the key selling point that job-seekers will look for when evaluating a job.

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Source: Management Issues, 8 November 2007. Copyright © 2000-2007 Management-Issues Ltd. All rights reserved.