Choose Accounting over Finance?

Of course, this may seem a stupid question. Before the financial crisis in 2007, everyone seemed to enjoy the "finance" ride and regret why they didn't choose "finance" as their university major. The earnings potential and the growing respect from parents, teachers, peers, and the whole public world etc, have helped shifting the traditionally heavily weighted accounting major to finance major in recent years. However, there is a question: are you sure you can handle a job in finance?

Not everyone can do finance - I can assure you that. Each of us has his or her own natural skill sets, intuitions, and point of views on a subject. Finance is the same. Don't think that Finance will always bring you the most money home. If you work your way up, you can be quite successful in accounting too!!!

Typical career path for accountant, then, would be clerk accountant, later senior one. You will be raised to manager level afterwards, and then probably financial controller. If you were aggressive enough, next step would be Chief Financial Officer (CFO). This will be a partner like position, i.e. you share firm's profit by holding a percentage of shares - either public company or private company. The pay is not bad at all, and sometimes, even better than what you can do with your "dream" finance career.

Am I buffing? No. I have seen many cases, in my real life. You think accountant makes less money, wrong. They can make money that your eyes would wide opened for a day!!!

And the most important thing, accounting offers stability that no finance career can offer. As long as you do your job right, you move up. 10-15 years later, if you were managerial type, you probably would be CFO then. In between, any financial crisis or what so ever, would not hurt you - because you are the backbone of any business type. You are needed.

Lots of finance guys (ibankers, traders, private equity guys) look down on accounting guys, and I can assure you that whoever look down on this group, are actually super weak in accounting themselves. They didn't even know how accounting works, and how important it is to a business. And any experienced finance person would know that one can't ignore accounting. If they learnt that the CEO of a public company ignores what his/ her company's financial reporting status, they would short its stocks right away. Examples? LEH - Lehman Brothers. Long time ignorance of the importance of LEH's reporting status while only concentrating on "how to make money" forced the legend CEO Richard Fuld to put LEH in the darkest age in LEH's life - basically no life after all. Mis-understanding of basic capital usage and leverage, and with all those unclear off-balance sheet investments, destroyed the one time top tier investment bank from one of the world's most famous wall street firms to nothing in matter of days. This serious ignorance can't be ignored.

Know who you are. Most people who can choose between finance and accounting probably had experience in studying both subjects. Know what you want. Try to see yourself in 10 years. Given both career paths lie in front of you, which one will you choose then? Stability over Excitement? High volatile incomes in any given days or Stable yet high incomes in later years? It is your choice. There is no turn around once you decided.

Think carefully...

and Good luck