Here’s Why An Accounting Degree is Worth It

step one click on one of my videos step 2 smash like step 3 step 4 try no but seriously my viewers know the rules before this video even begins let's give the like button a smash what's happening guys so a little bit ago I decided to audit my YouTube account and I posted a poll asking you guys what kind of videos that you want me to make and it seemed like a lot of you wanted me to make a video about being an accounting major and I'd also like to give a quick prayer to our accountant brothers and sisters that have probably been working 80 hours a week since January 1st and now since the stimulus bill extended the tax season for another two or three months they're probably going to be working even more you guys are awesome keep up all the good work anyways this video is gonna be all about accounting and I'm gonna be talking about the salary job satisfaction demand and also X factors that are gonna be important for this career and right now I'm trying out this style of content just to see if you guys like it and if the evil YouTube algorithm likes it and I'll do a few videos like this and if they work out then I'll do a lot more in the future so first of all this is just an overview of an accounting degree and some of the stuff that you jus in a job after you get an accounting degree I'm gonna go over some of the important factors and at the end I'm gonna give it a score or rating out of 10 but don't ever go into a career or a degree just because it has good statistics or I give it a high rating on one of these videos make sure that you actually have an interest in the subject and as always this is just my opinion make sure you do your own research before you make any life-changing decisions alright so first let's talk about salary so one of the great things about an accounting degree which I'm gonna touch on a lot more later is the fact that it's extremely flexible like many business degrees there's a ton of flexibility in the direction that you can take your career you can become an accountant or an auditor a financial analyst a personal financial adviser or even a financial manager so to put these numbers in perspective the median annual wage for all occupations is around thirty eight thousand six hundred dollars and for business occupations that's around sixty eight thousand three hundred dollars accountants are also often really business savvy and they can end up in high-ranking positions and companies like CEO or vice president on top of this let's say you just choose one particular job let's say you go with accountant for instance there's so many different career paths that you can go down there's a ton of different certifications you can get there's a ton of different industries you can work in and all of these are going to have completely different salaries now there are several different variations of accounting degrees but when you start you can expect to earn in the mid $50,000 a year range and then after the 10 year mark you can earn somewhere around 88 to a hundred and thirty thousand a year and this shows that although you may start off low there's a ton of growth and opportunity here for what you can make in the future overall this one's really tough to pin down on exactly how much you can make because there's just so many different routes you can take in so many different industries that you can go into but I'm gonna give this one a score of 9 this is definitely one where you can get to six figures if that's your goal and there's not that many four-year degrees that will allow you to do that and next we're gonna talk about something that for most people is probably even more important than pay and that is job satisfaction so overall accounting can get kind of a bad rap here many people probably see accounting as kind of tedious and boring and there is some truth to that on a personal level a girl that I went to high school with went into accounting without really looking into what the day-to-day tasks are and within a few months she basically told me that she hated her job luckily accounting is pretty flexible so she was able to transition into becoming a recruiter and she liked that job a lot more so I'm really happy to say that that turned out well for her but she was really pushing her luck by not researching it there are specific types of people that might really enjoy the tedious kind of nature of bookkeeping and all that sort of thing when it comes to accounting and I think it's important that you realize what you're getting into before you fully commit to something and there's several ways that you can examine the job satisfaction of any specific career first let's look at the percentage of people that thinks that whatever job they do makes the world a better place in other words how meaningful is their work and when we look at this accounting related degrees tend to fall in the mid to low 40s overall this is a bit below average especially when you compare it to health degrees like nursing which comes in at like 83 percent or other healthcare degrees which come in in the 80s it's also lower than other math related degrees such as engineering but I think it's important that we keep this in perspective because it's actually relatively decent when you compared to other business degrees such as international business or marketing and business careers can tend to be relatively money oriented and you can kind of lose sight into what you originally went into the career for but meaning is only part of the equation when it comes to job satisfaction for instance if your job was to play video games all day long it would probably have relatively low meaning but relatively high job satisfaction and this seems to be the case with accounting as it does come in at about 71 percent of job satisfaction which is above average this is higher than a lot of the other career paths in business and it even comes close to being around the same as some of the engineering career paths now I've talked a lot on this channel about how you need to make about $70,000 a year for your happiness to be at its highest after $70,000 a year it doesn't really increase all that much so I always say 70 75 thousand a year somewhere around there is what you should aim for an accounting easily hits that $70,000 a year mark it can even get up to over six figures a year so overall I'm gonna go ahead and give this one a 7 in job satisfaction next we're going to talk about demand now looking at all the career paths that I mentioned before accountant auditor financial analyst financial advisor and financial manager you'll see that the demand is somewhere between six and seven percent usually with an outlier of 16 percent for the financial manager now 6 to 7 percent is above the average of 5 percent so it's good but not great this is pretty low if you compare it to health careers like respiratory therapists registered nurse or physician assistant or if you compare it to tech careers like software developer however the good news is there is a ton of accounting jobs out there so you likely won't have to move across the country in order to be able to get a good job and on top of that there's so many different paths that you can go down where there's a lot of opportunity and there's also a lot of jobs another thing to consider when you're thinking about demand is how essential is your job or in other words how much to society need your job nearly all Health Careers for instance are extremely essential even if the apocalypse was happening we would still have doctors nurses and other health care professionals that would be taking care of sick and injured people but in my opinion accounting is a relatively essential profession as well businesses will always need accountants to interpret balance their books and do their taxes so in my opinion as long as we always have a government that makes new laws will also always have accountants now there is a small possibility that a lot of jobs could be eliminated if the government ever simplified the tax system but in my opinion that's a long shot now the next thing in this category that you want to think about is automation and outsourcing now according to a 2013 study by Oxford University accountants have a 98% chance of being automated will robots take my job comm shows that accounting has a 94 percent chance of being automated and a poll on the website showed that they have a 65 percent chance of being automated according to the opinions of people who took the poll and I'm not gonna sugarcoat this this is extremely high compared to a lot of other occupations now you guys know how biased I am against automation and specifically algorithms in fact one of my main hobbies one of my main passions in life is figuring out how to make these videos in such a way where they smash the algorithm and I honestly think some of these ratings are pretty controversial because they don't take a lot of human elements into consideration for instance this same paper thinks that waiters and waitresses have a 94% chance of automation which I completely disagree with I think one of the main reasons that people go out to restaurants is because they get that service and that human interaction so no matter how advanced robots get I think that people will always want to interact with other human beings I think some of the lower level more simple jobs like bookkeepers yeah sure they're probably gonna get automated or outsource at some point however the laws are always changing business is always changing and accountants are basically the humans that interpret the laws and they have what's known as finesse and they can use this finesse in order to crunch the numbers and save you as much money as possible and I think all jobs are going to be somewhat affected by AI and outsourcing and just streamlining of processes in general but I still think that accounting is gonna be relatively safe because usually when you solve one problem three more problems pop up and we will always need business savvy middlemen such as accountants in order to interpret the law and save us as much money as possible and usually anything that involves the law moves at a snail's pace so even if accounting does get to the point where it can be automated it'll probably take it several decades before the government even a allows a machine to do it for you without being said if you're thinking of going into this major you do need to put a lot of thought into thinking about the career that you're going into and whether that's something that will be affected by automation for instance many accountants are supplementing their skills by learning the basics of computer programming such as Python and if you're thinking about a particular accounting career and you think that it's something that can easily be outsourced to someone else or automated and you probably don't want to go down that road but overall there's so much speculation about the future and nobody really knows for sure but there's a fantastic 2.2 percent unemployment rate for accountants and that's well below basically any other field of study overall there's a ton of speculation here and I can definitely see if you disagree with me on this but I'm gonna give it an 8.5 next let's go ahead and talk about X factors so I think one thing that's really amazing about business degrees in general is that you end up learning the language of money business degrees tend to teach you a lot about budgeting saving networking investing and leadership and these are entrepreneurial skills that give them a very high chance of being financially successful in life in fact when you look up the statistics you find that many millionaires do have business degrees out of all degrees accounting is the sixth most likely to make you a millionaire and six out of the top ten degrees that create the most millionaires are business related degrees now there is a counter-argument to this of course it could be that people who are financially successful tend to be attracted to degrees that have to do with business and money and it really wouldn't have mattered what degree they would have gotten they would have been financially successful anyways nobody knows for sure but what you can say for sure is that learning the basics of personal finance and money management will likely lead to you being financially successful accounting is also a very flexible career that could lead to you either being an entrepreneur or maybe moving into a high-level position in a business think about it even if you're just a small business accountant doing the taxes for all these different types of businesses will tell you which ones are thriving and which ones are struggling this would more or less give you insider information on which industries you should invest in or maybe which industries you should take out a business loan on and get into I think this is one of the big reasons why you see so many millionaire accountants still there is that risk of automation or outsourcing and I think this is probably a little worse for accounting than a lot of the other business degrees but overall pretty much all degrees ranked high when it comes to X factors and that's because they're so flexible and all the different options that you have you can work in a bunch of different industries you can go a lot of different paths whichever way you want you're not really stuck in any one thing so overall I'm gonna give accounting a nine when it comes to X factors so I'm gonna quickly summarized the pros and the cons of going into accounting so the pros is that it's very flexible there's lots of opportunity there's good pay especially later on in the career there's a decent job outlook for the future and it's a stable career where there be jobs basically anywhere that you move the cons here is that it's very tedious work there's lots of number crunching there's a possibility that it might be outsourced or automated in the future the pay is a bit low compared to some of the other business degrees when you first start and there's not as much human interaction and I guess this could be a pro or a con depending on your personality so the overall score is gonna be eight point three seven five which is really solid check out my other videos right here I made them just for you go ahead smash the like button hit the subscribe button ring the notification bell and then comment down below any ideas that you have on the video or any other comments thank you so much for watching and bye for now

Channel: Shane Hummus

Views: 270,083

Keywords: Shane, Hummus, Shane Hummus, robinhood, accounting, accounting major, accountant, cpa, cpa firm, public accounting, private accounting, accounting student, accounting degree, real world, post college advice, cpa exam, studying for accounting, accounting 101, accounting basics, accounting class, accounting myths, 6 accounting myths, accounting tips, accounting profession, cpa profession, how to be a cpa, cpa life, cpa student, accountant job, accounting job, accounting duties

Id: 06DH-8QM6D0

Length: 12min 13sec (733 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 05 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/IcarusX12]

Switch to what? Virtually every job will be at risk of automation.

[u/Coffee4evel]

There are definitely tasks that will be automated and with that, the accountants roles will change. The roles could move more towards critical thinking, strategizing and other stuff that humans are still better at vs robots. Automation will also open jobs opportunities in the automation implementation/maintenance side. Diversify and look into programming languages like Python or low-code automation tools like Microsoft Power Automate, Power Apps and business intelligence tools like Power BI. This way you can add more value to your team but also use these tool as an insurance/hedge that will give you the option of pivoting into another career if you need to.

I have implemented some of these tools in my current role (Assistant Controller in a small PE shop) and can say that they are definitely worth the time and effort they require to learn/implement. I have provided a lot of value plus now I feel the that I can open my own Automation/Business Intelligence shop.

[u/[deleted]]

Accounting isnt going to be automated, itll just change

[u/paciolionthegulf]

This is a topic that comes up pretty regularly, so a search of the subreddit will no doubt bring up many helpful comments. The overall take seems to be that clerical tasks are ripe for automation, but professional tasks really are not... or not soon.

[u/KL040590]

PA will not be automated but I suspect industry will be pretty barebones by 2040