AT Think

Things may start looking up by the end of the year for those in the finance and accounting profession, according to a survey by Morgan McKinley, a global professional recruitment consultancy firm.

It’s a relevant question given today’s crapshoot of an economy. Students spend years studying finance, auditing and budgeting, join their local chapters of professional associations and network with key practitioners in their community. As thousands of graduates enter the workforce this month the question remains: now what?

Young employees don’t want to work.

"'Onboarding': the process of acquiring, accommodating,assimilating and accelerating new team members, whether they come fromoutside or inside the organization. It is used to refer to theadministrative work involved with setting an employee up in a new jobor role. Onboarding is now more broadly defined as the entire processof aligning an organization around recruiting, hiring, and helping thenew employee reach full productivity as quickly as possible." - from Wikipedia.org.

Firms thatwant to cut costs must be careful not to trim too much in the name ofshort-term savings.

The best managers in the future will be those who can adapt their organizations to these realities of Web 2.0 and the young people who develop their lives around it. So says a consultant and former journalist on managing the “Facebook Generation.”

The accounting profession, which for years bemoaned a lack of skilled tax and accounting staff, may be in for a change.

We already know that CPAs are cool and go beyond the stereotype of number-crunchers and anal-retentive geeks. Karen O'Connor-Joyner a full-time CPA in Fairfax, Va., is a shining example of this.

People are jumping on the social networking bandwagon left and right in hopes of drumming up more business. But is it working?

Henry Reininger is a 72-year-old accountant who escaped the Nazis in Austria and spent most of his life in New York City.