Accounting Student Interested In Consulting? Start in Audit!
Like many others in college, I wanted to somehow use my finance, accounting, and business skills to help businesses optimize processes and become more efficient and profitable. In my pursuit of the consulting role, I searched for roles in advisory services and quickly learned that these roles did not fit my expectations or desires coming out of college. These roles did not meet my expectations for two main reasons:
Client Size - I didn’t know it at the time, but I would come to learn that I preferred working with smaller and medium sized businesses as opposed to the larger publicly traded companies.
Personal Development - Many entry level advisory roles at larger companies put fresh graduates in a seat and have them testing IT controls or reading templated questionnaires to disinterested client personnel. While this may be a great career path for some, there weren’t enough transferable skills to service my ultimate career goals.
Up until this point, I always thought that going towards audit would have me working long and unfulfilling hours with limited rewards. While I was right about the hours, I found a firm that made the experience more manageable and rewarding. By performing assurance engagements for smaller businesses, I was able to:
Develop face-to-face client service skills and relationships
Understand a wide variety of clients’ business models and internal environments
Expose myself to the whole of my clients’ financial operation in a relatively short time period
Use those skills in a consultative role during the assurance engagements
Undertake separate consulting engagements for clients I built relationships with
Years later, I can confidently say that starting my career in audit provided me with an excellent base of skills and expertise to leverage into a more consultative role with the clients that I want to work with, and doing work that I enjoy far more than traditional audit or entry level consulting. While the work in audit may not seem as glamorous at first, the amount of training you get that can be leveraged into other roles is immense if you put yourself in the right position at the right firm. In hindsight, the decision to start in audit/assurance paid off for me (even if I didn’t see it at the time) and I hope you can use the information I shared with you to make a better decision for yourself in the future.