Why do we ask kids what they want to be when they grow up? Kids don’t know anything. They have no idea what the job market looks like now, let alone what it’ll look like in 15 years when they’re going to be shoved out into it. This is why so many kids say they want to be firefighters, or president of the United States, when every adult knows that fire departments will be disintermediated by 2035, and that the executive branch will shortly afterward be taken over by an AI trained in China.
Instead, we should only start asking people what they want to be once they’ve had a few years in the workforce and learned some of the grim realities, so they can make informed decisions. Unfortunately, time is an arrow, so by the point that we’re really ready to decide what we want to be, most of us are already stuck with being something. At that point, since you can’t ask “What do I want to be?” anymore, the best you can do is, “How do I want to be what I’ve already committed to?”
This is a less terrifying question for accountants, since they’ve often chosen their profession for good, well-thought-out reasons (as opposed to blindly grabbing the first job that came along post-graduation, like the rest of us — or me, at least), and because it offers a wide range of attractive options. With that in mind, we’ve broken that broad question down into five narrower questions that accountants should be asking themselves at any stage in their career:
