How to become an Accountant
My usual response when someone asks me why I became an accountant is, "Because I didn't have enough personality to become an actuary." If I get the expected laugh, I continue with a more in-depth explanation. (If I get blank looks, I quickly change the subject.)
Accountants have the reputation of being in- or semi-human "bean counters," obsessing over meaningless trivia and creating artificial obstacles that inhibit or prevent a business entity from carrying out its mission. Like most such characterizations, there is a small element of truth buried under many layers of myth and rationalizations by people who don't understand the profession. Consequently, the first requirement in becoming an accountant is to develop a thick skin. You're going to be dealing with people who, by and large, probably don't understand what you do. As a result, they unjustly tend to feel inferior, and understandably resent you.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that most accountants don't communicate in human language very well. Yes, accounting is the "language of business," and business is a human activity, but it does involve a number of specialized terms and concepts. A lazy accountant will not bother to try and explain what these mean in ways that the people who have to use the financial statements and reports he or she generates can understand, leaving the rest of the profession to try and repair the damage.
Not that other professions are immune to this tendency. Some physicians, for example, give a bad name to the entire profession by a lack of bedside manner, or an arrogant attitude towards anyone who hasn't gone through four years of medical school or doesn't play golf.
The second requirement in becoming a good accountant, then, is to develop good communications skills. Your profession requires you to do many things in specific ways, and use specific terminology that may be baffling to your client or co-worker. It is therefore up to you to make certain others understand you. After these two important requirements, a thick skin and good communication skills, you can start to work on the more mundane aspects of the profession.
Of the more usual requirements to becoming an accountant, the ability to understand business itself is paramount. As an accountant, you are (in a very real sense) the "interpreter" for what is going on for everyone in the business, the shareholders, the government, and the public at large. You cannot, however, interpret for others what you don't understand yourself.
Understanding business comes naturally to many people, even if most of them have brainwashed themselves into thinking that they "can't get all that stuff." Your job will be to help them "get it." That means studying bookkeeping (the mechanical aspect of accounting), economics, finance, even law as it pertains to business. When I was in college studying accounting, my fellow accounting students typically complained that we had it much harder than anyone else in the College of Business, because we had to become experts in everybody else's field, while they only had to worry about one course of study.
The usual gripe (and it was almost true) was that we had to take more and harder economics courses than the economics majors. We had the sympathy of students in Navy ROTC, who, regardless of their major, had to take non-credit marine engineering courses which caused great fear and trepidation among even engineering students. The number and difficulty of the courses, however, were not the chief problem. I quickly discovered that, in the real world, what we learned in economics did not bear a very close resemblance to what really went on, or explain how the economy really works. The problem is that virtually all of economics today is Keynesian, and Keynes (despite the fact that he wrote a book in 1936 on "employment, interest, and money") didn't understand money, credit, banking, or finance. We would have done much better to use the economics textbooks written by Dr. Harold Moulton in the 1930s, which described reality, than modern texts dictated by unrealistic Keynesian assumptions.
This brings us to the most important thing in becoming an accountant, or anything else, for that matter. The most important thing you can learn in school is that you don't know one blessed thing about being an accountant just because you have a diploma. The only thing you can really learn in school is how to learn. If you go into your first entry-level job in accounting thinking that you actually know accounting, you will be useless to the company, and extremely frustrated. At best, what you learned is the language of accounting, some theory of which you probably don't grasp the implications, and a willingness to listen to and learn from people who have actually been doing accounting, and can show you how it's done. It's only after you've been "doing accounting" for a while that a light goes on, and you can call yourself an accountant.
