Accountant with Off-Duty Manual Skills Interests
He finally found a satisfying career path while still able to enjoy off-duty time working in dirt and sawdust.
FAMILY BACKGROUND
NY’s father was a drywall contractor. His mother was a homemaker who also worked within her husband’s contracting business as a secretary / bookkeeper. NY was the oldest son among their six children.
CHILDHOOD THOUGHTS OF A POTENTIAL ADULT CAREER
NY’s grandfather was a locally well known, successful home builder who maintained an outwardly modest lifestyle but was presumed within his extended family to be a wealthy developer. NY liked to visit his grandfather’s home construction projects to watch the sub-contractors, including his father, at work within their respective trades.
PARENTAL INFLUENCE CHANGES AN EARLY CAREER GOAL
NY enjoyed swinging a hammer and especially looked forward to the prospect of being wealthy so he told his parents that he would like to follow his grandfather into the home building business. However, NY’s mother discouraged him from pursuing a career involving physical work, recommending instead that he think about jobs where he could use his mind since he had already shown an ability to succeed in elementary arithmetic and high school math courses.
Having obediently accepted his mother’s request to avoid a certain career path, NY then had to decide in what alternative direction to head. Coincident with his high school years, micro-computers had become available to general consumers; this new equipment looked intriguing and informally, NY heard that folks working in the computer industry could earn lots of money, thus meeting two of PJ’s career goals: (1) interesting work and (2) earn lots of money.
EARLY CAREER GOAL CHANGES DURING COLLEGE YEARS
For deciding where to apply to colleges, NY established several criteria: (1) the school (college or university didn’t matter) must be close to home so NY could stay in touch with his local friends; (2) a strong computer science program; (3) due to his dislike for being rejected at anything, NY would only apply to schools likely to accept him, based on the “conventional wisdom” of his guidance counselor and friends.
NY was accepted by the university of his first choice and immediately signed up for several computer science oriented courses. However, like many college freshman, NY was too easily distracted by new friends and a college student’s ability to find and consume alcoholic beverages despite minimum age laws designed to prohibit underage drinking. Accordingly, NY’s college grades suffered by lack of self-discipline so he opted for an apparently easier academic focus on “Criminal Justice” toward a possible career as a police detective or FBI agent.
While not too far along into criminal justice courses, NY learned that the FBI was employing accountants to investigate and prosecute “white collar” crimes. So presumably one way to be hired by the FBI was to earn a degree in accounting, which could utilize NY’s math skills and probably be well paid while solving crimes and bringing bad guys to justice! Additionally, accounting skills would be useful in any business context and would likely improve an applicant’s chances to be hired over other college graduates who had only general business degrees because employers should appreciate that anyone earning an accounting degree had mastered a very mentally challenging array of courses.
INTERVIEWING FOR THAT FIRST JOB ON THE CAREER PATH
Through the university’s career center, NY was able to schedule several interviews with his preferred, medium sized accounting firms. Prior to his first job interview, NY heard from classmates that they were asked questions about obscure accounting issues so he was overly nervous during his first interview, which NY was sufficiently self-aware to conclude it did not go well despite the feared accounting trivia question never being presented.
For his second interview, NY calmed down by convincing himself that he would not be hit with a trivia question; plus he now had the experience of completing an employment interview and envisioned presenting himself successfully rather than failing. (Editor’s note – Many successful athletes and other kinds of performers such as singers and keynote speakers, prepare for an upcoming game or presentation by mentally picturing their personal success, which calms them down to set the stage – literally – for a successful performance; you can pay money to a Job Coach to receive this same advice here for free!)
The day following his second interview, NY called his interviewer to thank him for taking the time to talk about NY’s career hopes and the possible job opening. This initiative by NY demonstrated a positive degree of his business maturity and enthusiasm to work with the prospective employer. The employer was apparently sufficiently impressed by NY to promptly offer him a job as an insurance auditor, to perform audits of insurance company records to determine whether they have complied with state mandated, underwriting guidlines. (Editor’s note – an “audit” is an official financial inspection of an account, typically by an independent person or organization. “Underwriting” is the process of assessing a risk to decide whether to take on that financial risk. As an example, a company which offers insurance coverage for an automobile will want to know – before issuing an insurance policy – whether the driver has been involved in vehicle accidents and if so whether the driver was at fault in any of those accidents; the insurance company will then adjust the rate it charges to the driver according to the insurance company’s underwriter.)
DEDICATION AND CONTINUED LEARNING EARN PROMOTIONS
NY worked hard to perform his assigned duties accurately and promptly. He interacted well with co-workers and was continuing to learn new accounting procedures. His managers knew of NY’s accounting degree so when the long-time head of the accounting department was set to retire, NY, at age 24, was promoted to head the accounting department. Now he could finally use his accounting skills (and talk about debits and credits!). NY was pleased by his managers’ vote of confidence and especially by the increase in his base salary.
CAREER CHALLENGE – FIRST TIME SUPERVISING OTHERS IN A BUSINESS
With only two years’ adult business experience and only the same two years learning the business practices and culture of his company, NY found himself – at age 24 – now supervising and being responsibile for co-workers who were both older and longer tenured with the company. NY decided to manage by being fair, respectful, supportive and avoiding drama while at the same time letting it be known that he expected high quality performance, always trying to set a good example by himself accomplishing those multiple goals.
SUCCESS LEADS TO MORE PROMOTIONS
During the course of NY’s total 35 year career with his company, he was eventually promoted to serve as Treasurer, then Director and once served as Vice President, Board Secretary and Board Treasurer – all at the same time! To NY’s continued appreciation, salary increases were included with each promotion.
SUCCESS DOES NOT PREVENT CAREER CHALLENGES
Despite NY’s continuing career success and resulting job title promotions, one individual started to pick on him continuously and – in NY’s view – without good reason. Perhaps the motivation was jealousy or a type of mental illness (e.g. “excessive narcissistic behavior”) but whatever the informal diagnosis, the co-worker’s conduct became annoying and also noticed by management. Fortunately for NY, other co-workers sided with him because they had a long time to observe his high quality work and ability to function as a cooperative team member. So eventually the managers intervened to suppress the disruptive behavior of the difficult co-worker.
(Editor’s note – A common career challenge is having to deal with difficult personalities among co-worker peers or managers. For a relatively new employee, this presents a significant challenge before you have built up credibility by your own job performance. Co-workers inevitably take sides among employees obviously and significantly disagreeing with each other. Which one is right and which one is wrong? Resolving this situation requires maturity to try to de-escalate the situation by avoiding confrontations while establishing yourself as the reliable, common sense, dedicated worker. But this may only increase the determination of the difficult co-worker to undermine your work performance in the eyes of co-workers and managers. If the situation doesn’t calm down sufficiently, the new employee must take some form of action such as speaking to the company’s human resource team and/or to managers. Of course another alternative is to seek different employment. There is no specific recommended action to fit every circumstance.)
CAREER SATISFACTION
NY takes pride (Editor’s note – justifiable pride) in having accomplished the following within his long career as an accountant within a complex business:
(1) Learning how to prepare sophisticated financial budgets involving multiple moving parts, which were approved by managers who likely didn’t always fully understand the details but which always resulted in at least 97% accuracy to forecast income and expenses to the budget predictions.
(2) Payroll was always completed promptly and accurately despite inevitable problems with unanticipated and unpreventable issues with workload and technology.
(3) Outside auditors routinely advised the company’s Board of Directors to which NY was responsible for himself and those he supervised, that the accounting standards compliance achieved by NY’s accounting department was beyond their expectations in every positive way.
(4) As a result of his years of dedicated work, NY was compensated more than fairly according to his personal, informal understanding of his market value had he worked as an accountant with similar responsibilities, anywhere else.
IN RETROSPECT, DID I CHOOSE THE RIGHT CAREER FOR ME?
Looking back after spending his career inside an office building while deferring to his mother’s early recommendation to avoid pursuing a career in the trades, NY noted his continued enjoyment with amateur home maintenance projects and wondered whether he should have followed his childhood interest in working with his hands (and arms and back) to build homes but NY has ultimately concluded that he achieved career satisfaction in a different way while maintaining an off-duty outlet for his interest in hands-on work by finding seemingly unending home projects to satisfy his joy while playing in sawdust and dirt.
