More Advice for Students and New Accountants in 2025

I interact with a lot of students in a lot of accountants who are early in their careers, and there are some pieces of advice that are so brief that they don't deserve their own blog post by themselves, however, they are important. Nonetheless. Today I'm going to share two pieces of critical information that I would have loved to have early in my career. 

Expertise Comes from Experience 

As someone who became a straight A student partway through college and was constantly applauded by teachers and fellow students in the process, I was blindsided by the real world. I went from being smart in the context of the classroom to clueless in the context of the professional world. I couldn't help but wonder how all these people were this much better than me and the answer was simply that they had experience. The old saying that “repetition is the mother of all skills" is certainly true in the world of accounting. Over the years of professional development and exposure to various engagements, you can become incredibly proficient with Excel, efficient at your job, and experience with a number of different things you didn't even learn about in school. What I didn't realize at the time was that every time my manager did something, they did it with the information of thousands of hours of workpaper, preparation, review comments, and other on-the-job training that I simply didn't have. What I have come to realize is that I can get that experience too by simply doing more work. In short, you can get really good at preparing financial statements if you have to prepare a lot of financial statements. What does this mean for a young professional? It means that You want to become good at a certain aspect of your job, you need to go out of your way to do that thing more often and get more feedback on it so you can accelerate that learning curve. But just remember, practicing something the wrong way will only make you better at doing it the wrong way. Be sure to get feedback at reasonable intervals to keep yourself on for pace to learn efficiently and effectively.

Internships aren't the same as Full time Jobs

Even if your internship allows you to work 40 hours a week, You are still an intern. Generally, interns are given a lot more leeway than a full-time associate in terms of their work product quality and the difficulty of their work. As an intern, you will likely be given some of the easiest projects with very detailed instructions and a significant amount of oversight. All of these things combined together to form an environment that allows you to not mess up in a big way. The same cannot be said for full-time workers. Firms will make an effort to create an effective environment for learning and getting work done for its new hires, but they will not treat you the same as an intern. For life, a better term interns or babies and are treated as such while new associates are treated like clueless adults. As you transition from an internship to a full-time position, don't expect to be treated like a baby, because nobody likes an adult that needs to have their diapers changed. 

Why is this important?

In my many years of working with students and young professionals, I need to constantly remind them and myself that the thing they lack is perspective. Everything that I've mentioned here above is the result of a new professional not understanding what the experienced professionals understand. If you are a student, intern, or new professional, I strongly encourage you to ask questions in an effort to gain perspective in order to do your job better. If you are humble enough to communicate this lack of perspective and your effort to gain it in order to do a better job, you will be surprised at how quickly you can learn.