NorthBay biz takes a look at the growing demand for CPAs in the business world and discovers a growing number of college students who, due to the promise of high pay and high job availability, are getting in on the ground floor.
If there was a silver lining in the infamous corporate scandals that rocked companies like Enron and
WorldCom at the beginning of the decade, it’s that, years after the corporate behemoths collapsed under the weight of their fraudulently inflated stock, there remains a healthy demand for CPAs.
WorldCom at the beginning of the decade, it’s that, years after the corporate behemoths collapsed under the weight of their fraudulently inflated stock, there remains a healthy demand for CPAs.
In the wake of the WorldCom debacle—regarded as one of the biggest accounting scandals in the country’s history— Congress enacted the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOA) of 2002. SOA created stricter accountability and reporting requirements for publicly traded companies. And while some of the blame for the scandals fell (justifiably or not) on accountants, Terry Lease, a professor of accounting and chair of the School of Business Administration at Sonoma State University, says the legislation created a sustained demand for public and management accountants. “The market has never fully caught up with the demand for accountants from the high-profile collapses,” he explains. “It forced companies to have more done in terms of audits. They’re having to hire a lot more accounting and finance people.”
Immediately following the 2002 enactment of SOA, “firms had to work extra hard to hire accounting and finance people,” says Lease. “That demand has never reached an equilibrium with the supply. It’s never quite caught up.”
The high-profile scandals also took a toll on the reputation of a once-respected and trusted occupation. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act “came at a time when a great deal of the fault was placed on accountants,” Lease says. Accounting, once viewed as an esteemed career that attracted ethical people, “took an immediate hit,” he continues. “The reputation suffered, but Sarbanes-Oxley came along, and the impression of accountants rebounded pretty quickly."
The path to public accounting is no cakewalk. To qualify and take the Uniform Certified Public Accountants Exam, a candidate must have a bachelor’s degree and at least one year of job experience, according to Lease. Many students will earn their degree and land a job while preparing to take the exam, which consists of four sections: auditing and attestation; business environment and concepts; financial accounting and reporting; and regulation.
“It’s not an easy exam,” says Lease.
Getting there
SSU doesn’t have a specific degree program in accounting, but students can earn a bachelor’s in business administration with a concentration in accounting; this requires a minimum of five accounting classes, which most students exceed.
When it comes time to start thinking about a job, students at the Rohnert Park campus also benefit from an active accounting forum, a student organization that organizes four recruiting events per year: two job fairs and two banquets. The fairs attract a variety of firms interested in hiring graduates, and the banquets give students and employers a chance to talk in a more intimate setting.
Joe Standridge, a Santa Rosa-based CPA and adjunct professor at SSU who serves as adviser to the accounting forum, says, “the success of the SSU program can be attributed to the excellence of our faculty and the quality of the students we attract. Our new dean, Bill Silver, has been incredibly supportive of our efforts.”
According to Standridge, the accounting fairs and banquets are a great chance for students to meet potential employers. Three of the “Big Four” accounting firms (PriceWaterhouseCoopers, KPMG and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu) are represented each year at the fair, as are regional and local accounting firms such as Moss Adams and Pisenti & Brinker, along with corporations such as Chevron and government agencies such as the IRS.
“The whole process is set to facilitate the transition for students to go from the classroom to employment,” says Standridge.
Recruiting activity on the SSU campus has mirrored the demand arc that followed the WorldCom and Enron scandals. “Seven or eight years ago, we had very few—if any—firms on campus recruiting. With the support of the accounting faculty, I went after firms and companies to increase our visibility both locally and in the Bay Area,” explains Standridge. “In time, we were able to generate more jobs than students. And with the WorldCom debacle and the subsequent demand for accountants, we were able to firmly entrench ourselves with leading accountancy firms in Santa Rosa, San Francisco, Walnut Creek, San Jose and Sacramento.”
The SSU program encourages students to do an unpaid project with an accounting firm during their sophomore year to learn more about the career. In many cases, that puts them on track for a summer internship with the same company the next year, for which they’re paid in excess of $20 per hour. “And if students are doing well at the end of the summer, they’re usually offered a full-time position when they graduate the following summer,” says Standridge. “This summer, we placed more than 20 students in positions starting next September—and we haven’t even had our big accounting fair yet!”
Shayne Cooper is one of those students. He graduated from SSU in May 2009. While still a student, in fall 2008, he interviewed for jobs and eventually landed an internship with Dal Poggetto & Company LLP in Santa Rosa for the 2009 tax season with the promise of a job upon graduation. He’s now a staff accountant in the tax department and is preparing for the state CPA exam. “It seems like most graduates are able to get into a place, start working and begin taking the CPA exam sections while they work,” he says.
Change of scene
Cooper was a returning student who enrolled at SSU because he and his wife had family in the area. He’d taken some accounting classes during his first stint in college, but left school and spent seven years as a service technician for AT&T. “I decided when I went back to school, I wanted to study accounting,” he says.
And while Cooper admits he didn’t really look into the SSU business school before enrolling, he was “really satisfied with the instructors and the program, and the accounting forum does so much for everybody. Also, I think the school size makes it really easy for students to communicate with instructors. They were always available.”
He found the learning environment demanding and has found the workplace equally so. “Where I work now is really challenging,” he says. “I’m always learning something. It’s a great career path.”
But the toughest part, he says, was making the initial connection. “I really had to step out of my comfort level and get out there and meet the firms,” says Cooper. “At first, I was really shy about going up to people I’d never met before and talking to them. I learned relatively quickly, though, that was something I needed to become comfortable with. That’s how you get interviews.”
Increased interest
The popularity of accounting is evident by the numbers: At SSU, roughly 160 of the 600 to 700 students in the upper division of the business school have a concentration in accounting. “The number of students with a concentration in accounting has been increasing,” says Lease. “Word is out that accounting students get jobs. There’s a demand for them, and the numbers I’ve seen are holding steady and probably increasing.
“We’re also seeing a number of students who have degrees—maybe in business, maybe not—who are now interested in going into accounting,” he continues. “Some of it’s because they end up getting jobs: They might have a degree in history, and jobs in history aren’t as plentiful as jobs in accounting.”
That’s because good accounting firms are always looking for bright graduates. Jeff Gutsch, a partner at Moss Adams LLP, a regional firm with an office in Santa Rosa, handles recruiting as part of his duties. “It varies from year to year depending on the market and the quality of candidates coming out of school,” he says, “but every year, we hire a certain number of entry level people.”
Moss Adams has 20 offices, mostly on the West Coast. Its Santa Rosa office recruits primarily from SSU, but also from CSU Chico and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where candidates are more likely to be from the Sonoma County area and therefore more inclined to settle here.
“We compete with the Big Four for the best and the brightest graduates,” Gutsch explains, saying an ideal candidate has a mix of achievements and experience. “The best correlation for students’ success in our business are grades in their accounting major; their overall GPA; work they did while in school; and their extra-curricular activities.”
According to Gutsch, Moss Adams is always hiring entry-level employees. “We feel like, no matter what the market is, we have to hire entry-level people. That’s what feeds our ability to grow our client base,” he says.
He then likens it to an NFL team’s draft strategy: “If you decide you’re not going to draft any players, well, in a few years, you’re not going to have a very good team. Rookies aren’t necessarily going to be stars in their first year or two, but three or four years down the road, those are the people you’re going to be counting on.”
If that means making room on the bench, so be it. “We carefully evaluate the people we have to make sure we have room for the best and the brightest when it comes to recruiting the next class,” he says. “For a firm like ours to be successful, we can’t opt out from hiring one year. We like to think we have a pretty good team, but we have to feed the business by having new people coming in. We can’t afford to sit out a year of the draft.”
During the high-tech boom, Gutsch says, his firm was having trouble competing with “high-flying tech companies. We had candidates pulled off the table because of that. But since then, the tech sector has taken a few steps back and a lot more people are considering public accounting and getting their degrees in accounting.”
CPAs are well compensated. According to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, junior-level CPA jobs (0 to 3 years of experience) range from $40,000 to $66,000 per year depending on the size of the firm. For senior-level (4 to 6 years of experience) salaries, the range is from $52,000 to $83,000. Salaries in corporate accounting are slightly lower. The Bureau of Labor Statistics forecasts accountant jobs will grow by 18 percent between 2006 and 2016, which is faster than the average for all occupations.
Options abound
Another option for students interested in the accounting and bookkeeping field is Empire College, a Santa Rosa institution that specializes in career training in business, law, technology and medical fields. The college offers classes to prepare students for an associate’s degree in accounting and transfer to a four-year college for a bachelor’s degree.
The program at Empire College attracts students with a variety of experience. “We might have someone who just graduated from high school and someone with 20 years of experience who just got laid off and is looking for a new career,” says Carol Reinke, who is the head of the accounting department.
Reinke notes, “we’ve had a lot of people from the mortgage industry come in as students” after the housing market collapsed. Before that, there was a wave of students who’d lost their jobs when Agilent laid off many of its workers. Empire College’s program lets students fit their class schedule around full-time jobs, because they can easily transfer between the night and day programs.
Plus, she adds, “it’s important to note that not every career needs a four-year degree” to be involved with accounting. “We offer an AA degree, and you can then be a junior accountant or a bookkeeper or an auditing clerk,” says Reinke. “And doing that doesn’t mean you can’t go out and get your degree later. We encourage students to be lifelong learners.”
An accounting background opens a lot of doors in the business world, she continues. “It can be a jumping board for any type of business,” she says. “You can be a CPA, a CEO or a CFO, because you know the language of business.”
Ginny VanAntwerp worked in the mortgage industry for 20 years, but as the mortgage business went south, she was laid off three times and realized it was time for a change. She now works for Empire College as a career services assistant while she studies for her accounting degree at night. “The whole business just went kaput. With the help of friends and family, I decided to go back to school and study what I’d always loved and enjoyed: numbers. I’m one of those people whose checkbook has to balance to the penny.
“I believe there are jobs to be had in this field,” she continues. “It’s a field that’s not going to go away. Whether businesses grow or don’t grow, they’re always going to need someone to balance the debits and credits.”
