A job for bubbly people

Accountancy has a reputation for being dull. But, as Linda Blackburne discovers, you need a personality to succeed - and an ability to spin data is useful, too

There was a time when accountancy was considered a dull, grey profession. But not any more. The Enron scandal and the crisis at WorldCom proved that the people who control the balance sheet are often anything but conservative.

Ninety-five per cent of FTSE 350 firms have an accountant on their board, while 57 per cent of FTSE 100 have accountants as their finance directors. Salaries for FDs are among the highest in the boardroom, and regularly top £100,000 a year.

As if this wasn't enough to be going along with, a recent survey commissioned for World Book Day reveals that accountants are the best-read profession, pushing secretaries, politicians and journalists into second, third and fourth places respectively. Accountants spend an average of five-and-a-quarter hours every week reading for pleasure, and are the most voracious consumers of comic titles.

Alongside such cultural revelations, accountancy and management consultancy firms are attempting to make themselves more attractive to young recruits. Until recently the big companies had been taking on fewer graduate trainees in response to the uncertain economic climate, but numbers now appear to be on the increase. Chris Fredericksen, the chairman of 2020 Innovation Group, an organisation that provides courses and products for the profession, claims that these lean years will see some firms struggle to find suitably-qualified candidates for partnership positions in the future.

According to Fredericksen, companies are trying to make training contracts more interesting by including financial services and strategic planning modules alongside the standard accounts and auditing tuition. The industry is also trying to address relatively poor starting salaries of between £22,000 and £24,000, which are considerably lower than those available from other finance and investment companies.

Since the Enron and WorldCom scandals, the accounting industry has been under great pressure to reform its traditionally cosy relationship with clients. Critics claim that accountancy firms cannot be truly independent when their staff are employed by clients in both an audit and consultancy capacity. In response, bosses argue that they have internal safeguards to prevent any conflicts of interest, but the figures make interesting reading. Andersen, the firm brought down by Enron that is now part of Deloitte, earns 23 times more in consultancy fees from BSkyB than it does from its audit work.

But any change in the status quo could be good for job hunters. Should the big audit firms ever be forced to spin off their management consultancy businesses, the number of opportunities for graduate trainees could rise.

More than half of all qualified accountants in the UK are chartered and have trained with the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW), or the institutes in Scotland and Ireland. The Institute is the largest professional accountancy body in Europe, with 125,000 members and 3,000 new entrants every year. The remainder train mainly with the business-focused Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA), the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), and the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA).

Students looking for an accountancy career slightly lower down the ladder can become an accounting technician. Technicians carry out the same tasks as accountants, but are not qualified to conduct audits or dispense high-level financial advice. The Association of Accounting Technicians and the ACCA both offer qualifications at this level.

To enter a training contract with the ICAEW, trainees need at least 18 UCAS points - 80 per cent of the English Institute's students are graduates with firsts or upper-second-class degrees. Unlike some of the accountancy bodies, the institute stipulates that training must be with an approved employer, usually a firm of chartered accountants, but some students also train with the National Audit Office or in banks and other businesses.

At the end of the contract, students must have a firm grasp of accounting principles, business operations, profitable performance and market competitiveness, alongside good communications skills, a grasp of professional ethics and a broad understanding of the legal implications of business transactions.

Professor Brian Chiplin, the executive director of education and training at the institute, says: "One of the strengths of our qualification is you don't need an accounting or business degree. But the majority [of our students], about 80 per cent, come from business, economics, science or engineering backgrounds, with the remainder from the arts. Clearly it is important that accountancy students have basic numeracy, but it's not necessary to understand high-level maths.

"Also important are an interest in and understanding of business, but the biggest thing for me is analysis and asking the right questions. That's what audits are about. The high-level examinations are about high-level questions - the sort of things you would ask a chief executive officer or a finance director on a client site."

Baker Tilly partner Teresa Graham, a specialist in helping small businesses, has this advice for people thinking of entering the industry: "It is bloody hard work, but the rewards are there in terms of money and job satisfaction. Only embark on this career if you have a personality. Contrary to public opinion, dull, anal people are not those who rise within the ranks. You have to be bubbly, sensitive, tough, assertive, self-motivated, a good people manager and believe passionately in client service."

Jokes abound about accountants manipulating figures for clients, such as: "What does two plus two equal?" asks the client. "What do you want it to equal?" replies the accountant. But these asides have a basis in truth, and some observers believe an ability to spin data is vital.

"Really clever accountants are just as adept at spin as the average cabinet minister," says John Stokdyk, the editor of AccountingWEB.co.uk, the daily news service for 200,000 accountants worldwide. "People skills are really quite important, and a wise head is a vital ingredient for the job."

There are a huge array of opportunities available for qualified accountants. For those looking to specialise there are opportunities in taxation, corporate recovery and insolvency, forensic accounting and litigation support, corporate finance, the public sector and charities, and industry and commerce. In the City, opportunities abound in banking, insurance, broking and asset management.

Management consultants often recruit graduates direct from university and put them through MBA courses at business schools. The main role of a consultant is to carry out strategic reviews of a business, and design and implement systems to improve efficiency or correct faults.

The ICAEW's Associate Chartered Accountants are respected in countries around the globe. The larger accounting firms and the so-called big four (KPMG, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte and Ernst & Young) - often offer secondments of up to two years at their offices overseas.

A fully qualified accountant is likely to earn £46,020, according to a salaries survey conducted last year by Robert Half Finance and Accounting. A financial director's average salary is £59,520, an auditor's average pay packet is £34,550, and a pay-roll executive can expect to earn £25,920.

But if you're still wondering whether you're cut out to be an accountant, test your wit on this, penned by a comic at The MacDonald Partnership: "There are just three types of accountants: those who can count and those who can't."

'I had always been interested in numbers'

few of us get the privilege of looking down the list of footballers' salaries at West Ham United, but for trainee accountant Amy Fuller it's all in a day's work.

Deloitte, Amy's London employer, carries out audits for the First Division London club. And another auditing job took Fuller to Lowdham Grange Prison, near Nottingham.

"It's quite exciting," says the 25-year-old from Yorkshire who now lives in Wapping, east London. "You go into the prisons and work alongside the wardens. At West Ham, you look at the different areas of their financial statements and part of their balance sheets. They show you the players and how they value the players."

Fuller's father, Geoff Fuller, is an accountant with Arla Foods in Leeds, but for a long time the book-keeper's daughter shuddered at the thought of following in her dad's footsteps. After dabbling in geology at Cambridge for two years, she switched to history and the philosophy of science, gained a 2:1 and landed a job with Aspire, the charity that helps homeless people sell goods through catalogues.

But her dad's influence was too strong and Fuller finally decided she wanted to be an accountant after all. "I changed," she says. "Basically, I had always been interested in numbers."

So she started doing the accounts for Aspire, and now she is halfway through her three-year training contract with Deloitte.

But her heart is still with charity work. She is a volunteer and finance officer for Campus Children's Holidays, the charity that takes disadvantaged children from Liverpool on holiday. And it was with her Campus hat on that she won the Institute for Chartered Accountants in England and Wales' (ICAEW) 2004 award.

Like Fuller, Ed Banham, from Pudsey, near Leeds, never thought he would end up being an accountant. Banham, 30, graduated from Leeds University with an 2:1 in economics. It was only later, when he was working for a West Yorkshire information technology and manufacturing company, that he became interested in numbers, and ended up being an accounts manager.

He's now training with the ICAEW at KPMG, and hopes one day to be working in private practice or in a financial consultancy.

Both Fuller and Banham describe getting a training contract with a big bank as "tough". They had two or three interviews, including meetings with the senior manager or partner.

Banham sees the funny side of being an accountant. Counting caravans in Hull or totting up hunks of meat in abattoirs might not be everybody's idea of fun but, says Banham, he's seeing the "nitty-gritty" of life. Did the Enron and WorldCom scandals put them off the profession? No, says Banham, but they raised the profile of accountancy and auditing in the media. Fuller agrees: "The scandals highlighted how important the profession is."

education@independent.co.uk