Finding a Career Path After Audit

If you’re like a lot of accountants, you may have started your career as an auditor. 

Whether at a Big Four firm or a smaller local/regional office, accounting majors are often told during college that they must go into audit to gain experience with different clients/industries and to “learn the basics.”

While some people spend their entire careers in audit (and in many cases, at one accounting firm), most auditors will leave their firm for a different role. 

In fact, a study by SUNY Buffalo noted that between 2010 - 2017, more than 1 in 5 auditors left their firm each year. With that study being 7 years old, and with the current accounting shortage, I wouldn’t be surprised if that turnover has increased in recent years. And I’m not sure what’s scarier, those statistics or the fact that 2017 was 7 years ago…

The issue is that, in a lot of cases, auditors don’t really know what types of roles and opportunities are out there, and their managers can’t provide too much guidance because they’ve spent their entire careers as auditors (likely at one firm).

So in this post, I’m hoping to cover a few different potential options you could pursue if you are looking to leave audit. The list can be exhaustive, but these highlight some “standard” landing spots.

Before we dive in, a quick note: this post isn’t meant to bash auditing. Plenty of people find their rhythm in audit and are happy and successful, and that’s great! Just statistically, in most cases, auditors will leave for another type of role, so this post is trying to help that majority.

Accounting Advisory

You might hear the term advisory, CAS, CAAS, whatever you want to call it, advisory gives you the opportunity to still work with clients and gain experience in different industries, companies, and areas of accounting, but instead of auditing your clients, you’re helping them with their accounting, and in many cases, how to interpret their accounting results into the bigger picture for their companies.

Like audit, advisory also gives you that wide range of experience that can help accelerate your career and allow you to create a wide network within accounting and finance. I always think of it as taking the “good” parts of auditing (experience at different companies) but removing, atleast to me, the “bad” part (i.e., the auditing).

However, just like audit, its client work, so there can be downsides, with schedules being erratic and your day to day depending on your specific project (which impacts intensity of work, work/life balance, etc.).

One last thing to consider for advisory: the audit firm you’re already working at might have an advisory branch, so you may even be able to change your career but stay at your current employer!

If your firm doesn’t have advisory, there are plenty of firms out there who do, and that list is constantly growing as it becomes a larger focus for smaller/regional firms.

A personal note from my career: After I left auditing, I joined an advisory firm and stayed for 7 years. I think it allowed me to learn and grow significantly and really boosted my overall career trajectory. While I don’t work at the firm anymore, I do some light advisory-related work as a side hustle and really enjoy it.

Industry Accountant

We usually use this term to describe someone working in the accounting department of a company (think senior accountant through controller or even CFO). These people were your clients when you were an auditor.

While it varies company by company, you typically get a better work/life balance and a more predictable schedule when you transition into industry from audit. There are also a lot of potential different specialties (month end close, technical accounting, financial reporting, generalist etc.) that you can focus on. Types of companies (private, public, private-equity backed, venture capital backed, multi subsidiary, etc.) will also drive your overall experience.

The downsides can be the limited experience (i.e., only gaining accounting and operational experience at one company versus working at several clients), annual raises and promotions can be less numerous than in auditing since team sizes and roles are limited, and, in some cases, the hours can be just as bad as auditing.

A personal note from my career: After my years in advisory, I grew a bit tired of client services and jumped into industry for about 2.5 years and really enjoyed it. I was able to leverage my knowledge from all my advisory clients and help shape the accounting function for my organizations. I also had great bosses during my time in industry, which is a huge plus.

Non-Accounting Roles

Other options include leveraging your accounting skills but in more finance-related roles, a common one being financial planning and analysis (FP&A). FP&A roles usually focus on planning and budgeting within a company and interpreting accounting results into company strategy. It’s a different skill set, but it’s often looked on favorably to have both accounting and FP&A experience when trying to land higher roles (VP of Finance, CFO).

In other cases, people may leave accounting and finance altogether and pivot into a new career. Since auditors have opportunities to hone several skills, including communication and collaboration, operational skills, and conflict management (to name a few), auditors can pivot to several different types of non-accounting/finance roles. I’ve seen people go into sales, marketing, operations, basically anything. While there may be a steep learning curve, these people had a desire to do something different, so they pursued it (we can cover more of these soft skills in a later post...).

A personal note from my career: I recently made a career change and joined a software start up. Now I cheated a bit since its an accounting software, but I have been able to leverage a lot of the soft skills I learned in my audit, advisory, and industry roles to help the company strategically grow.

Also, I’ve never been in an FP&A role, so I unfortunately can’t speak to it from personal experience, but I’ve worked alongside plenty of FP&A folks.

It’s really about finding an opportunity that’s right for you

While I highlight a few common post-audit roles, the list of opportunities can be endless, so if you are looking to leave audit, really think about your overall career goals and what you enjoy doing, and try to determine the next natural career progression in your pursuit of those goals. 

Additionally, if you’re an auditor, it’s likely your first “grown up” job (i.e., your first job out of college), and it’s scary to leave that first job.

But, you’ll see that as your career progresses, you will leave multiple jobs…some by choice, others, not so much. It’s never easy, but its natural in everyone’s career. So while you should make sure to give the decision the appropriate level of consideration, just know most of the workforce leaves their jobs eventually.

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