Accounting Skills Are The Most Sought After In Australia (Okay, But Why?)

This article is presented in collaboration with Chartered Accountants.

Beastie Boys once said they had the skills to pay the bills, but unless Mike D was specifically referring to his ability to analyse financial statements, their song wouldn’t hold much water in 2016.

Data released earlier this year by recruitment site Search Party revealed that accounting skills are the most sought-after in Australia.

Employers in each state named ‘accountancy’ as either the number one specialist skill they were looking for in prospective hires, or in the top five.

(To be super specific about it all, ‘accountancy’ was the number one most sought-after skill in New South Wales, Queensland and South Australia, number two in Western Australia, number three in Victoria and the ACT, and number five in the Northern Territory and Tasmania.)

LinkedIn, even more recently, followed suit by saying Australian employers are, above all, looking for those who can conduct statistical analysis and data mining. Care to guess which industry that applies to?

Of course, there are obvious benefits to becoming an accountant.

First of all, you get sweet Ben Affleck movies named after you…

The Accountant

… not to mention all the hilarious jokes that come with the gig.

Parks and Rec

But still, we have to wonder... why? Why are the skills that come with accounting, specifically, so highly sought after?

“What we find when we’re talking to the marketplace, the reason there is such a demand is, whether it’s probably the top job in finance – a CFO – or some of the more transactional entry level roles around credit management, accounts receivable, payable and things like payroll, it’s the significance of what that function adds to an organisation,” David Cawley, regional director of accountancy and finance for recruitment agency Hays, explained to Student Edge.

“If you think about the very upper levels, like CFOs, they work with investors, analysts, advise the board; they have an integration with a very broad range of stakeholders and obviously they have a lot of customer focus as well.

“I think as more of those senior roles have developed and with finance leaders playing an even closer role in the strategy of the business, making key decisions around where the organisation is going, I think that probably highlights quite an interesting career path, and that’s where we see a lot of the demand coming from.”

Though he believes accounting can lead to an “interesting career path”, he concedes that students picking higher education courses may not necessarily see it as leading to a life of variety.

“I don’t think there’s enough [graduates] and I think where maybe there is a disconnect is the attraction of going into higher education and understanding what a career in accountancy can offer you,” he said.

“The top jobs may look quite a way off, for someone who’s thinking, ‘Okay, what are my higher education choices and how am I going to pursue those?’

“[T]he challenge we probably have is to highlight that… [the top jobs are] not going to happen tomorrow and you’ve got to stick at it and develop and build, and gain the experience if you’ve got the ambition to be at the high level at the senior end of your career.”

It’s not just Australia that needs more accountants, David insists.

“I think [the demand’s] global. In my role I sit across our [Australia/New Zealand] business and head up the accounting team and finance business, and I have colleagues in all the major countries that Hays is in, which is pretty much most of the developed world,” he said.

“Of course there are surplus candidates in some areas and of course we see that not every type of background is in demand, but I would say as an overview, we see that as a problem – a skills shortage – across the world. “

Parks and Rec