The Three Rules of Being a Good First-year Associate
In most public accounting firms, first year associates are the future of the firm, they are the learners, and they are the worker bees. Being a first year associate can be challenging because it presents a lot of new opportunities to learn and grow to professionals who are very young in their career. With so many new things going on for the first year associate, their attitude plays a key role in whether or not they will succeed. However, consciously maintaining a good attitude is not the easiest thing to do. So I've created a list of three rules for associates to follow that will guide their actions and produce great results. Let's jump in!
Rule #1 - Keep Things Moving
In a public accounting firm, it is essential. Dad, jobs are progressing towards their completion. While this might seem obvious, you'd be surprised at how often first-year associates spend too much time not communicating or just spinning their wheels on work. Staring at something for a little bit and taking some extra time to learn how to do it. It can be an effective learning tool, but you shouldn't be doing that on every single engagement. Ideally, the time taken learning on one engagement reduces the amount of time needed to learn on other engagements that are similar. Despite all the learning, it is guaranteed that there will be parts of an engagement that an associate doesn't know how to do. At that point, it is the associate's responsibility to ask questions or get a manager involved to make sure everything is getting done. In my experience, the best first-year associates were not only the ones that did good work and asked questions, they also felt the responsibility to see every engagement through to the end and didn't consider themselves done until the entire job was issued.
Rule #2 - Be humble & Don't Change Anything
As a first year associate, you lack meaningful professional experience by definition. In public accounting, there are many ways to complete workpapers and get work done. If you have done one engagement and believe that that is the way everything should be done because that's the only way you've done it, you are going to run into a whole lot of trouble later on. As a first-year associate, there is a 99% chance that you are not special enough to have discovered a brand new way of doing things at a public accounting firm that has existed for more than 5 years. In most cases, your confusion arises from your lack of understanding of the topic at hand and not everyone else. In many cases, the best way to learn as a first-year associate in public accounting is to follow the prior year work paper and try to understand how everything works. Until you are comfortable creating the work paper from scratch by memory, you probably shouldn't make any changes to how things are done. Keep that in mind as you gain exposure to new work papers!
Rule #3 - Don't Complain
Obvious disclaimer here: no one shouldn't have to put up with a hostile work environment or unreasonable amount of working hours that they didn't sign up for. However, first year associates at public accounting firms find themselves in a unique position of ignorance and responsibility. They know they need to get things done, but they don't necessarily know how to manage their time. This dynamic often creates stress that is difficult for the new associate to handle. One of the biggest mistakes I've seen first year associates make is that they complain about their situation and other people rather than learning how to fix it themselves. Over the years, I've seen many complaints about types of work, working hours, team Dynamics, and various other aspects of the job. While these complaints are sometimes valid, the complaints themselves are almost always a waste of time. For example:
Complaining about the working style of a manager won't help you adapt to working with them
Complaining about the type of work you were given will not make that work go away
Complaining about the complexity of a work paper won't help you understand it better
Complaining about the software the firm uses won't make them adopt the software that you are used to
Complaining about whoever prepared the prior year won't get the work paper done this year
Complaining about the partner won't get you anywhere, quite frankly.
While it might be refreshing to vent from time to time, if you find yourself complaining a lot instead of learning as a first-year associate, you are doing yourself a disservice. All the time you spend complaining could be spent on getting things done and developing yourself!
First year associates just follow these rules and you will be amazed at how much more productive you can be!