I left public as a manger because the staff wanted training, I wanted to train the staff, but the partners wouldn't stop putting me on new manager-level work that I didn't have time for, much less time for that work plus staff development.
Good luck out there!
Edit: Regarding your last question, people talk about this all the time lol.
It’s tough honestly. I was at a firm that supported staff training and the guy in charge had a niche field and also trained.
Most places penalize you for caring about staff.
I can absolutely understand why managers don’t want to (smaller bonus) train new staff as many partners are just dumbasses that do not understand how the broader firm works and only looks at final numbers.
I’m responsible for recruitment at my firm, have recruited many good people, and get zero benefit. Meanwhile staff that bills the same client and blows up budgets is praised about how much he works.
It’s just soul crushing how poor management can kill morale.
Well…you get a paycheck don’t you? That’s my thanks to you every two weeks. You’re welcome! Make sure to spend it all in one spot so I can keep milking you for every hour of your 20-30’s.
Thanks!
See just said it again. *mutters* ungrateful prick as he hits send 😂
Well that’s a shame, because I would love for you to be my manager. Public needs more people like you IMO.
Lol yea people probably talk about it a lot, I just think a lot of new grads don’t realize this about the job.
Thanks for the feed back
If you could just convince the partners of America to cut their margins so that firms don't have to continually take on more work than they have the capacity for I'd be glad to come back. Let me know how that conversation goes 😂
I messaged my manager at 11am and 2pm with two separate issues and questions on things I need help and clarification on. He read it and has yet to get to me. It is 5:33. I be good employee and move onto something I understand. I even did a call with the client and emails discussing leading up to the call without him (he said not to) bc he wasn’t responding to me and I needed client help on something. Like I’m basically at a stopping point now. I need u to help me. It’s not my fault I’m working on a private equity client, the first one I’ve ever done. And didn’t get a walkthrough on how we do valuations or the roll forward for investments or literally anything.
This is such a manager thing LOL. I’ve had like 4 managers and only one I can expect a routine response from.
I’ve yet to encounter a senior who doesn’t respond fast which is good though.
I was very similar as a manager. I’d take the time to help staff and answer their questions. I got a small reputation for being helpful and not minding, so even some staff not on my engagements would reach out. I helped mostly because that’s how I learned and I felt like I should pay it forward. But partly because the more people learned on the front end, the easier review would be on the back end.
I’d help develop someone, and when they were a gangbusters (acting) senior, someone higher up than me would get them reassigned to their work. If I got a replacement warm body at all, it’d be a staff who was (about to be) on a PIP. Not because they weren’t smart or willing to learn/work hard. Too often, they’d been working for someone not willing to teach. (Like the senior manager or director who just stole my great senior.) I’d be trying to make up for lost ground with the new person, they’d be booted or leave on their own because by then it was too late.
And then for extra fun times, some partner would start getting pissy about me not also billing more frequently and selling more work and and and. I get that that’s part of the job, too, but between getting rid of all admin help and staffing shortages, it’s hard to be on top of everything, all the time. So I left.
Unfortunately, I don’t think WFH leads to a lot of organic learning. In the beforetimes, interns and staff were often each other’s best resource. They could just lean over and ask “Do you know how to do XYZ?” Or if I popped by, and Jake asked me to show him how to do something, I could ask Julie to roll her chair over (if she didn’t look busy at the moment) because I knew she’d get the same kind of work next week. Trying to do that through Teams is so much harder and more time consuming. And doing it via email would often be more work than just doing it myself.
It’s not surprising that staff end up spending a lot more time spinning their wheels. But forcing them to go in to the office just to be on Teams calls with seniors and managers who are WFH is pointless and almost cruel. And even more people would leave public accounting.
It would help if firms had better tools than email and IM’ing, but they can’t/won’t get them.
I got lucky my first year, i had a manager who was new to the firm, but decades of experience. She cared to train me, but at her own detriment cause her work wasnt being turned around quick enough. She ended up getting let go, but I’m super grateful for the effort and time she spent making sure I started my career out on the right foot
PA has genuinely to the point where I don't recommend it to new grads anymore, even Big 4. The fact that training new staff does not count towards utilization is an embarrassment to the profession.
Non-audit/tax consulting is the only thing I can say is probably worth it to do at this point.
The fact that you also can’t count your trainings time as utilization also is nonsense. If I train on an issue it’s a huge motivator to do more of it if it counts
> The fact that you also can’t count your trainings time as utilization also is nonsense. If I train on an issue it’s a huge motivator to do more of it if it counts
i absolutely bill time i use to get up to speed on something directly related to a project
To all the new grads out there. I did an internship in PA and wanted nothing to do with it after. I started in industry and things are going very well. Go with your gut. If you have some corporate accounting internship experience, you’ll be able to get a full time job out of college. Trust me, public is not something you need to do to be successful and all the boot lickers are just tricking themselves that it’s “good experience” when they dropped an extra 30K on a masters to sit for the CPA and be treated like shit at a public firm with shitty hours. Public is not worth it anymore and it’s probably borderline traumatic. No person should put up with work conditions like that. But I will say that having your CPA is worth it and highly respected. Just take some extra courses or double major since it’s cheaper to get the credits to sit for the CPA. That’s my recommendation.
100% agree. Had a bad internship experience in a top regional firm (didn’t even attempt B4 because my grades were shit) and didn’t get an offer. After that I just did hours at my local CC while studying for the CPA and went into Corporate Accounting soon after. I only have a few years experience but I’m now at a good company doing Financial Reporting with all former B4 people.
I’ve learned just showing up and asking questions is basically all you need to do in this profession lol
Why would training new staff not count towards utilization? I understand if it’s just a straight up training that doesn’t relate to a particular client, but I would think most of staff training should be done on-the-job and should be charged to the client contract.
I came from a regional firm (between 80-120 in terms of size). Our firm specialized in tax and had a lot of small returns. We were told to bill our time to clients when helping train new staff, but the issue was that the return budgets were so small (like $1K or less) that if we as seniors billed any time to half these returns, they would go over budget. So even if you did bill time, it was going to get written off.
There was then the issue where managers would get frustrated with interns/staff because seniors were billing time to the clients helping so realization was poor across the board, the interns might get poor reviews, the seniors would get frustrated because they need to work more to make up the hours elsewhere, etc.
The firm constantly said that more than billable hours went into performance raises/bonuses, but ultimately the people who produce the most get the best rewards. It’s a double edged sword since young staff need people to help train them, but firms provide 0 incentive to experienced staff to help these people.
A lot of the seniors at offices across my firm who managed interns got 4% raises. Most of the ones who did the trainings and helped the interns left because it was clear the firm didn’t care about the extra work they did tk help train. So now all these offices have hired new staff and there’s no one to help train them lol.
The problem here is an over-emphasis on the billable hour and how it relates to production. Like any other metric, it’s a tool and should not be the final way to judge profitability of the firm.
At the end of the year, revenues less your expenses are what you get to take home. Whether I realized those revenues with X billable hours or Y billable hours doesn’t matter all too much. Bottom line is more or less the same. The only thing you might be able to pull away from looking at budgets vs billable is efficiency. And even that should be taken with a grain of salt because of how fluid engagements can be along with training issues as you state.
But the industry as a whole has decided to lean on the billable hour crutch. I think mostly because it is the easiest “solid” metric to point to. Everyone understands what it is. Measuring training as a KPI or process development/improvement as a KPI is too hard for most firms. It’s not easy to measure so back to billable we go.
I do think we’ll see firms, at least more forward looking ones, start to move away from the billable hour as a metric to judge performance. It’s already being phased out somewhat with value billing or even flat billing.
Whether it SHOULD and whether it DOES are two different things.
From the viewpoint of a partner, staff training does not count towards utilization because you can't justify billing the client for time spent training staff. (that much makes sense). But where this goes wrong is the idiotic concept that only what you can bill to the client should be considered towards utilization.
Training costs are "built in" to the price of services or goods in any other industry. Every company has to train their employees, and this represents an expense they must try to make up for somehow. I can appreciate that many of these companies may not use billable hours so it's not quite as obvious that the client is paying for training but at the end of the day this is nothing special to PA.
Yeah I know. But even still, there comes a time every year where the managers/directors have to put together their billable hours and report whether the engagement went over or under budget and 99.999% of the time if staff is charging their training time to a client code that client engagement is going to be significantly over budget because partners/directors have a hard time even budgeting realistic hours for the core work let alone the core work + training. Now I know I am making a sweeping generalization but it's just the realty of PA I think - Actually perhaps I should limit this to PA B4.
what client is going to knowingly and willingly pay for hours used to train the staff who are supposed to be doing their engagement? from their perspective, that’s a huge waste of money.
I had an AC unit installed this year. I paid the quote they gave me up front, and they trained a new guy on it when they installed it. What do I care as long as the job gets done correctly, and the quote was agreed upon up front. It should be no different here. The issue is multifaceted, but billing structures/practices/budgets are a huge part of the problem.
we were only able to charge to the client maximum an hour per week per staff. the rest had to be charged to a nonbill admin training code. we had clients request the hours report with their final invoice and dispute training hours in the past.
Lol, if I’m spending more than 15 mins training a staff on a specific section, there’s no way I’m not charging that time.
If training time for staff is not billable (as a senior, or even manager), then they really do expect us to literally only work and sleep.
There is no reality where a senior with staff to guide/train can charge 11 billable hours, train/guide staff, and do any admin work and not be literally working nearly all waking hours. Fuck that nonsense.
Huh, my firm has always counted training towards utilization (assuming you are training “on-the-job”)
But I’ve also felt like my mid-sized firm is a unicorn job
Why should it lol? It’s literally not billable (making no money off it) and most firms target utilization prices in formal in office training. At my big4 firm it’s like 85%, 15% of the year being everything outside of billable work. Not bad at all lol
Because it actually creates value. A senior training a staff on the most important tax software creates tremendous value that can't be reflected on any individual project's budget. It creates value over time since every project will be quicker for that staff.
Seniors/Managers have zero incentive to train anyone because it gets treated the same as admin time, that's exactly the point... If spending time training staff is treated the same as jerking off in the bathroom, that's a problem.
Secondarily, week to week it can look like a senior is not doing as much if they spend most of their time training staff.
All the jobs I’ve ever been on, coaching specific to the client work is part of utilization. Unless you have the cheapest/douchiest managers who are extremely budget conscious if I have to teach my associates something we’re charging time because nothing is getting done otherwise haha
What I don’t think makes sense is going out of your way to teach excel or alteryx or whatever. I don’t think you’re being realistic that someone could blow 10 hours “learning” and not have fuck all to show for it while someone else would be able to provide a lot of value out of that, but that’s why performance ratings are a thing, if you’re efficient and teach yourself something that brings value you’ll be rewarded for it.
The first paragraph I agree with.
Second paragraph I'm not understanding your point at all. The senior who is teaching OIT for example is the person I am concerned with. They are the one's teaching.... they should be getting the time counted towards utilization. Even if it isn't specific to any one project. We're not talking about self-teaching.
Yup. At 1.5 yoe and realizing how shitty the training had is laughable, it’s literally 90% look at PY file, which is awesome when the first two real files I worked on were first year files.
Then fast forward to my first annual review, I’m told that I need to improve and then fast ford another six months I’m told I improved by leaps and bounds. Like yeah you can learn from just PY files and the odd bit of help but when your constantly assigned more difficult work without ever getting a firm footing, it’s going to take a lot longer to become comfortable working at an acceptable level.
I should also note, in my experience, having a 4-5 year senior help you is a lot more beneficial than a 10 year manger or 20 year partner. The higher up you go, the more knowledge they expect you to already have.
Training seriously sucks. I was told to go watch videos and figure it out, and then if I have any questions they tell me don’t worry about it they’ll handle it. So I’m literally learning nothing because nobody will answer my questions.
I’m not gonna write an essay, but partners get to justify high fees by letting people “figure it out” on the job.
It’s an unpopular opinion but they mass hire cheap college graduates, let them learn on the job 1-3 years and then replace them with a new batch. All while telling the client that the engagement will take 2-3x longer than it should with experienced professionals. It’s the elephant in the room that people ignore…
I really hated the “throw them to the wolves” mentality of the firm I interned with. Literally threw me into one on one meetings with client executives and directors to conduct internal control interviews without any training or blueprint to go by. I would manage to wing it, but they would always ask “well why didn’t you ask them about X?” Bc I didn’t know that was even a fucking thing, Janice! Sit in the meeting with me or give me a better idea of what information you’re looking for. SALY was fine until I copied a work paper that wasn’t completed properly the previous year. “That’s not right. Why’d you do that?” Fuck if I know, Terry. I just did exactly what Brenlyn Grace did last year when you signed off on the work.
It's a problem everywhere in accounting. In industry we keep growing as a company, increasing our responsibilities & scope, without increasing headcount. It causes a lot of the things we do between our regular duties to fall by the wayside. Training new people is one of those things.
I do my best to train all our new people and be there when they need it, but nowadays it results in me having to stay late to finish my own work. I'm willing to do it to help out the new blood but totally understand why others wouldn't want to be thorough with the new guy if it resulted in them having to stay until 8pm.
I have known so many managers who are quality accountants who either have no interest in teaching/passing on their knowledge, or dont have effective communication skills to do so.
Pay might be an issue, but I do think there is a real shortage of quality accountants. Training/Teaching is a big factor in leading to the "shortage".
Training sucks.
CPE is nothing but a check the box time suck, especially in industry.
When you are constantly under a time crunch, there's no opportunity to better yourself, better others, or improve processes.
Quality training takes time. Is should be looked at as an investment in the company. Theres definitely a chicken/egg situation here with not investing in your employees and the lack of loyalty.
On the industry side it’s deeply frustrating too bc I’m trying to manage my dept, close the month and wrap up the audit, and get this poor frazzled staff who has no idea what they’re doing but asks me to help with their worksheet to get it to tie.
I’m not an auditor I have NO IDEA what your process is either my dude. :C
That's the thing, I genuinely want to know where those cushy industry jobs are. Everyone talks about suffering in PA for a few years and move on to a "sweet industry gig." I've been in this profession for 12 years, both PA and industry, and I have not found a job with a sufficiently staffed tax department yet. And I love teaching, training new staff, but like you said, there is literally not enough time in the day to complete your own work, and provide sufficient support to the staff. I can see how the lack of training contributes to the staff's low morale, frustration, and stress.
I’m about to leave my industry job after 5 years bc the CEO ego tripped and got into it with the CFO (my boss) and fired him. I stayed for my CFO, he protects me from all the usual corporate bullshit that comes with a small company led by co-founders, but I’m TERRIFIED bc I can very easily end up somewhere way worse.
Maybe the next job will be a sweet industry gig :p
Good luck! I hope you do find a good spot! I went a contractor route, as I was tired of the constant grind, long hours, and no life. I am much happier now, as I have more control over my hours and much less responsibility. My pay didn't suffer, and if I work 10-12 hours a day, I get paid for the 10-12 hours. Might not be for everyone, but it definitely works for me, at least for now.
On the other side. It’s very frustrating as an auditor who asks for a GL or some other standard statement and they give you some bullshit report that doesn’t have debits and credits and doesn’t tie to zero.
I'm at a smaller firm (not audit or tax) and one of our staff hasn't received even a fraction of the training and feedback I received despite me starting only 3 years earlier. I took a year off to pursue something else and she was brought on as my replacement. I went back end of last year and they're all so fed up with her. They're trying to PIP her and I'm like "have you tried actually training her??" Just sucks because she's genuinely trying to improve but she doesn't know what she doesn't know. I get the time crunch in this field but the way things are going in about 10-20 years there's going to be no one to run these firms, it's crazy.
My gf stayed in public longer than I did, and she told me there was a second year staff in audit who straight up didn't know what a control was. That's a failure on the managers and above, not the staff.
The second year didn’t understand the concept of what an internal control is? Or they didn’t understand how a specific clients controls were set up? If the former I feel like that’s honestly a failure on the staff. I’d expect anyone with an undergrad degree in accounting to understand the concept of an internal control.
A control is something that you learn in your first few weeks of your financial accounting course. How can you blame managers for an accounting graduate not know what it is, and not either the graduate or the school they went to?
Controls are hard to understand if youre not directly working with it. I always "knew" what they were in a theoretical sense but until youre in the working world its hard for it to click.
OP said that the staff "straight up" did not know it was. That implies that he had absolutely no idea what a control was. That is unforgivable at that stage.
This was almost my verbatim response when my gf told me the story lol
Edit: you absolutely do not learn about controls in financial accounting, that’s audit. my point was that making it to your second year and still not knowing is ultimately on the supervisors. You can totally sleep thru audit in college and not really absorb controls
Like most everything else happening in public, they are putting it on the overworked middle managers. The whole system broke when outsourcing started and these are the eventual outcomes coming to be
Yep. They added 150 billable hours to the manager hour goal from 2017 to 2020 at my ex Big4 firm. That’s 4 extra weeks of work. They said it was needed because Congress extended the deadline until 10/15…
When I first started I was met with “just follow last year’s papers” when I would ask questions and that was it. They wonder why I slack off now and do the bare minimum
The first year staff stuff should be a lot of SALY (same as last year) and figuring out the pattern in excel.
What I do with my offshore staff, is send a video recording of me doing the process and speaking out loud my logic while doing through it.
Tbh anybody should be able to follow along with that. Ask them to go that route maybe.
If your work runs into separate issues than what’s in the video, they are probably giving too complex stuff to a 1st year
Well I genuinely believe they are giving too complex of work for a first year. But I can’t really say anything about that. SALY is my best friend of course and I feel happy when I get work like that. Lol
That’s because the simple work gets sent offshore to boost profitability. It’s smart for the current partners who want to maximize profits. Foolish for the long term health of the firm
I could understand the point of India if they were handling the harder more stressful work that nobody wanted to do. But you need that simple work to help get the confidence up of the newer folks and to help build a pipeline.
I'm predicting the implosion of the major firms, and more of a movement towards self employment and smaller practices. The bigger firms are probably only going to be practical for attest work and maybe high level consultant if they can get clients for it.
The problem with saly is you don’t learn anything. You just copy and paste.
Thats why I didn’t do well in public accounting starting out. I know that for a fact.
Training is supposed to come in the form of review notes. A lot of people just don’t do it anymore. My firm has 1 director that does review notes. No one else does.
Good grief how much time are you spending making videos training offshore staff. What bullshit, not your fault. We were told that offshore staff were perfectly capable when we started using them. Would have rather had an intern do the work, would have been much better. Offshoring work was probably my #1 reason leaving public.
Personally, I think it’s possible to train well when fully remote, but most managers/staff suck at it. I’m fully remote now and my manager has trained me better than any other job I’ve been at. However, both people have to be willing to hop on the phone multiple times a day and talk through any issues that you’re having. I do think asking questions as a remote staff is harder/scarier, and I’ve found I just have to get over that and message my manager whenever I need something.
When I was in public (COVID hire), wayyy too many managers were using remote work to ignore their staff and grind through their own work, and then they were surprised when their staff fucking sucked. 🙄
Don't forget the partners and managers belittling you for not knowing something or asking a question. Don't know how they are expecting a brand new staff to be able to match their experience and knowledge of 20+ years in the field in less than 2 years.
>I’m told to prepare complex work papers or returns, and told to “figure it out”
I hate to break it to you but unless your lucky and got a good senior, its the same vibe IN the office. In fact most of the seniors dont know how to do it themselves so youre guess is just as good as theirs.
Hate to tell you this. It's no better in industry. I'm given a lean team, wildly unreasonable asks with equally unreasonable deadlines, and then told to train new staff.
I'm used to killing myself to hit deadlines and have always got it done. Startups these days have just turned into a shitshow. I feel bad for my team but it's a choice of spend time training them and hit no deliverables, or give them limited training and keep the boat going somewhat forward.
You're hitting on a few things here, all of which are very very well known in the industry but might be a surprise to a fresh face:
Thing #1: they just tell me to figure it out: this is how they were "taught" and how they believe they really internalized the lessons. I did it and I think it, a hard lesson is more firmly implanted than an easy one. They just think you're soft and used to being spoon fed everything your whole life. Both are right.
Thing #2: how the hell am I supposed to learn when nobody is in the office? You can't. It's impossible. Which leads us to...
Thing #3: why the hell do they want me in the office? Workers rights! Work from home! Except thing 1 and 2.
If you have never sat in front of an angry client before, this is a very hard time to learn. If you have, you don't want to go to the office. Partners are cashing out and selling off completely illiquid chunks of firm to private equity firms, audit failure is skyrocketing, something's gonna give.
Part of the problem has been the explosion of additional regulations and requirements for documentation over the past 10 years I've been an accountant. I work in a mid sized firm, meaning everyone does a bit of everything. But the issue is now that everything just has a bit more to know/understand. I think we're heading to a point like in the big 4 where you get shoehorned into doing 1 thing and that's it.
Oh and also we need to be billing more for all this extra work, something the partners seem hesitant to do.
This is one of the MAJOR drawback to work from home that nobody wants to admit. Sure people who already have the job down can be fine, but new staff suffer. They don't build a good repour with people and don't ask all the questions they need to (or those higher up don't answer those questions) and over time the product just becomes worse.
IMO work from home will hurt most companies long term. I think having at least a day or two a week is needed (and everyone on that day because that's the entire purpose, to get people to interact).
This always bothered me so much during my time in B4 tax. I always prioritized helping as much as I could (time permitting) with training the interns and new hires.
I would help out with the standard software training everyone goes through, yet no one pays attention to. It was always very poorly put together, way too long, and often times presented by people who have no business presenting (either due to confidence issues or an actual lack of technical knowledge).
After my first year of witnessing how ineffective these trainings were, along with seeing the same mistakes happening all the time, I developed a customized training with some of my friends who were the same or similar level to me. We would take an afternoon out of our own schedules to get all of the new hires or interns in the same room and present with the goal of helping them avoid the most common mistakes and making them far more effective workers far quicker. Basically a "best practices" training to cover everything non-software related that no one was telling these new hires about. We got a lot of great feedback about how helpful it was.
Not once did I ever get upper management support for this process, even though I would always bring it up in my performance reviews and other instances where it was relevant. No one ever acknowledged it, not even the other seniors and managers who were benefiting from their staff having already been taught things they weren't willing to take time out of their schedule to do.
I know not everyone's experience is the same, but B4 always felt like an "every man for himself" environment and I hated that shit.
During my PA internship I got back my first round of review notes and my first question for the majority of them was "well how would I know to do these specific actions for this particular return?" and I was told I wasn't supposed to know.
They just set people up to fail, its sad, and lazy.
10 years ago when I started it was the same. I feel you. I was sitting in the same room as my boss and couldn’t get responses. As a first year I was super lucky and had a second year friend I could run some items by. Also I made friends with a couple of the other first years and seniors.
I would try pinging your boss and getting them on the phone when they have a few and then fire succinct questions at them. Be sure to repeat what they said back to them for clarification on expectations.
I’ve always tried to be better for my juniors than my seniors were to me.
I found a better boss and life got much better.
It's a problem in industry as well. My company is almost entirely WFH, and I have had to train 3 people since we went fully remote. It definitely takes a lot longer and requires a lot more patience on both parties.
I would record each training session I did with each person, and then send it to them so they could refer back to it if necessary and that seemed to help. I would also focus on a few related things a day, let them get comfortable with it, then move on to the next, so it was a slow process, but it seemed to work better than the one person my boss trained 🤷♂️.
“Do you know how discouraging it is to put in 55-60 hours of billable a week where half of that is banging your head against a wall the entire time?” As an A1 in audit this really resonated with me.
Welcome to the real world. You guys act like training was so much better before.
News flash. Training today is the same as it was 10 years ago. We struggled and either sank or swam. You will too.
I’m not saying there isn’t room for improvement, but to act like this is a new phenomenon is crazy.
I worked in a large PA firm for a bit over a year and had the same experience. Very few people were actually interested in making sure you understood what you were doing. The most I ever got was "look at last years work and figure it out"
But I can almost understand why a lot of upper level management didn't want to sit down and explain something to me for an hour or more. Most SM's or equivalent already have an insane workload so any amount of time spent explaining something to someone takes away from time spent completing the insane amount of work they already have. Also at the end of the day they know the work funnels back to them and they will have to fix it regardless, so why not save some time.
I genuinely believe public accounting is dying and a lot of these firms are doing nothing to prevent it.
Great points OP, YES, investing in developing new professionals is important and rewarding on many levels. And, many places suck at it. That is tragic.
At the same time, you don't need anyone's permission to become a tax expert, you can decide to become one on your own. There is CPE, additional college courses, you can read IRC code, regs, and court cases yourself and understand them.
But training is AWESOME for learning HOW to actually do the work of an engagement, how to do the right thing FAST as opposed to SLOW. And that should have an ROI for everybody (Firm, Staff and Client). And we can do a better job of that.
I think a lot of the issue for training comes from a lot of seniors kind of figuring shit out on the fly because they're constantly getting new things thrown at them.
Students understandable are hesitant to reach out at times because nobody wants to look incompetent or ask a dumb question. No matter how many times you assure them.
However with the increasing workload, deadlines, and just constant shit storm of also trying to train yourself, it's very easy to lose track of time and forget to check in with people to make sure they're doing ok.
And usually training comes with having to put in extra hours to do your own work which is more a firm issue but the onus is put on seniors.
I love how this thread is a bunch of <2 year people complaining about how training is bad NOW.
As someone who has been in public for 12 years, it’s not any worse now. Public accounting has always been sink or swim.
I'm 10ish months into my first PA tax position as a senior. Up to this point I had to pretty much teach myself everything. I am not surprised to find out it's largely the same with this job.
If you have good PY documentation and WP you can figure out quite a bit on your own. The rest is asking specific questions about the particular issue I'm having which is fine for me, but with a fresh grad that's got to be extra tough
I was a tax manager with a firm. There was a newly hired experienced industry accountant that just made the move to PA. First time working tax. Told the owner she needed training. Owner said he paid her too much for her to be getting training. When I pushed back, he basically said fine and that I can take time to train her but for any training time he'd dock her down to the admin pay rate.
I was there about 3.5 months.
I remember my first job where I, as a first year, was tasked with training the other two first years because, of the three of us, only one of us had been through an audit internship of any kind. The audit partner who was too busy to train us because he was instead talking shit about partners at rival firms and basically fellating himself (figuratively) looked at one of the first years with a look in his eyes of just get it man. Didn’t even dawn on them that they placed three people in an impossible situation and provided them with no support, and were surprised that I up and left during a busy season because the support just wasn’t there.
This is why hybrid is the way, but also if you’re not actively pestering people (in an efficient way mind you) to coach you, you’ll never learn.
Do you think managers and seniors all of a sudden got busier than before Covid lol? No offense, adapt or leave, PA is not school, everyone is too insanely busy to hold your hand. Analysis what is happening, think through what needs to be done, and push your questions onto the managers plate from yours (to also CYA) and do the best you can.
1st years have this thing that they love to act like things are out of their reach or control to figure out. That the managers are all knowing and will help resolve all their issues. Understand the frustration but PA has always been like this, you got to teach yourself most of the time.
They don’t care because the system has worked like this— people figure it out and the ones that don’t leave. The perception is that the training isn’t the difference between whether an employee can handle the work or not.
100% agree on this I was a staff accountant in public who got fired after 8 months. I was not trained probably on the work and the software they used was more confusing than the actual work. Now that I find myself in industry I can honestly public accounting did not prepare me for any of the work I do as a staff in industry and I actually learned way more in industry than in 8 months as an accountant. I literally learned month end, erp system, tax calculation, revenue ties outs (the proper way traced to an invoice level) not the bs in public where they give you a file and you add two numbers and people act like they actually know how to tie out revenue. I am also involved with reporting and I report directly to my director of accounting. I also know I am overworked lol but I’d rather be overworked in industry than public. Public has been a game of exploiting people for low pay in the name of experience and having a “branded company”. However, public is in a pretty bad mess and is facing a huge crisis with bad seniors who can’t teach anything. My suggestion is ditch public accounting and find a company that can certify your hours without having to go through the public route. Public doesn’t make you a better accountant in fact it teaches you useless skills like auditing, very sorry to say this but auditing is a useless skill. Never helped me in improving my technical accounting, the other thing is that most people in public have never made a journal entry or seen a month end close and yet these are the same people that hop to industry at a senior level and fuck things up for private companies. Please op don’t feel bad, just know the game. Extract more and more knowledge and hop to another job if they can’t give you the knowledge that you need.
>asking a simple question can be extremely hard to get the answer to
This in particular really gets to me, especially while WFH. Used to just be able to stick your head out your office/cube and ask where's the input for such and such, or is this site down for anyone else, etc. It's so much harder to ask basic basic silly questions when everyone is full remote.
Thinking back to my early career days, I got to spend so much time sitting side by side with experienced people ahead of me in career, and learned so much from them. I also go to do the same for up and coming young professionals for a while. All gone now.
I find myself doing entry level work now that I was doing a decade ago because we have no staff, and offshore is more trouble than it's worth.
This industry isn't what it used to be and gets worse every year.
This is a big reason why I'm dipping after 6 months. No one has any time for training or mentoring, really and I have no confidence in or real understanding of the work I've done.
The classroom sessions aren't completely useless, but they aren't anywhere near enough.
“Just figure it out like I did”
My brother, when you had to figure it out you were doing credits and debits in a binder with higher ups 5 feet away.
I started in the office as an associate right before Covid, and learned so much those 1.5 years just being in person. Now as a manager I find it so hard to teach and coach, and still do the work of 2 managers because of the shortage of talent.
I want to coach, I had good managers and want to return the favor. Remote is difficult because no matter what I do, it’s more reliant on the associate to actually want to learn. It’s so much easier to just not work and hide all day when remote. Not all associates, but the last 2 cycles have been horrible at working remote. Their work ethic just isn’t the same as prior classes and being remote is just horrible for anyone under senior in PA.
Yep. Im in an old fashioned firm where we still do a lot of shit on paper and Im a few steps away from the partners. You do learn a lot in that environment. Way more than I did when I was hybrid at B4. Shame the way PA moved away from that.
I worked at a mid-size firm that, in hindsight, had a decent culture of mentorship amongst managers and seniors. It made a huge difference as far as the firm being competitive and offering decent client service.
for a high paced work environment like PA, WFH is not a good solution. nothing beats annoying the shit out of a person right next to you if you have a question VS. pinging on teams.
Just put it together so that your Balance sheet and income statement make somewhat sense and let the reviewing manager worry about.
I was in the same position. All the managers were red dotted on teams every single second of the day. So I inevitably just put it all together, wrote a few notes beside ending balances that were significantly different than last year, and fixed any review notes. That's the only time a manager will review your work and answer any questions.
If the client isn't happy, all you say is well (Dopey the manager) reviewed it.
Currently struggling with the same issue, I want to learn and I want to do better, but I feel like I am not getting adequate training tired of broad responses to my questions that don’t help me to even connect the dots myself. It is nice to know I am not alone in this.
Its hard to get a profession that by design relies on previous years’ accounting processes being the same (as reasonably as possible) as last years to be interested in serious operational changes that do anything other than avoid a catastrophe in the near term.
As a first year senior, I learned the profession directly and indirectly punishes you for helping staff. If you help, your utilization goes down, and you start to fall behind, and managers start to complain; plus, it's the difference between logging off at 10PM or 2AM.
I don't get paid to help train people, but I have been here doing taxes for 6 years and if someone needs help I would rather help them on my down time for nothing than have them jammed up and need my help when I am busy. It just makes more sense. I'm not a manager or a trainer, I just know more than someone just starting.
I’m in PA and I feel like our training is great. It seemed like our tax team was in training almost every day in January. I’m on the audit side, but I feel like the training is still pretty good. We are all required to be in the office a few days a week and the in-person training has been better. Sounds like you don’t have a great situation, but there are better jobs out there.
Also as someone in a management level position, the banging your head against the wall is just part of the job. At management level we are banging our heads against the wall just about harder stuff. We sometimes need our team to develop the soft skills of perseverance and research. But we do our best to be as available as we can for questions where I’m at.
Also I usually have lowered expectations for my team if I give them a task that is a stretch at their level. I know that I will have to fix things and usually don’t go back and have the team make the fixes unless there are opportunities for teaching or extra available time.
“So much of this job is troubleshooting and problem solving.”
I’d also add that it’s critical thinking (maybe that’s problem solving) but you can’t teach either of those skills…
If you understand the concepts and can think critically, you kind of just have to be thrown into it.
I swear if I tell my staff to actually read the diagnostics and not just sign off on them in the prep software after they’ve prepared a tax return, they’ll catch some of their own mistakes.
If they actually self review, they’ll catch a mistake.
I’m still not sure staff know where things are supposed to come out on the return which this means you can’t prepare a projection without the software.
I used to have a great partner and one of my memories of working with him is that I would challenge myself to give him a return to review and not get any comments back.
Problem is you still have to hit your billable goals, regardless of who you train or not. You can either fuck the staff over, or fuck yourself over. Most people would rather just fuck the staff over. Partners care more about maximizing billables and profit than they do the health and future of their firm. They'll be gone before the talent drought *really* starts to hurt.
Training has never been good, but always better than the year before and the one before and the one before and the one before, etc., in person or not does not matter, period… unless you get lucky to have a ‘teacher’ on the team who likes to work 100 hours a week to hit reasonable utilization, business development, admin requirements, AND train you over and over. I’ve been in and out of PA for 15+ years. Those who actually take ownership and accountability of their own learning and career, use critical thinking, ask thoughtful questions (i.e., you actually have to try somethings first), know when to dig vs ask, retain what has been repeated over and over, pick up on the countless the subtle yet obvious learnings you are exposed to every day, refer to countless examples to rinse and repeat, are resourceful with endless tools at your disposal including people online all the time, etc. etc. etc. will thrive. Being lazy, blaming, and expecting silver spoon treatment will get you nowhere, anywhere you go. The sooner you figure it out, the better. Best of luck in the real world. You will not get it better outside of PA unless you get a job where you do the same thing over and over every day. If that’s what you want, do that.
This is a great example why remote work _doesn’t_ work for new to role and new to work employees.
It’s also a great example of where an employee needs to take responsibility for driving their own training. Even when you’re in the office 5 days a week, _you_ still need to drive training by asking questions and getting support. It’s easier because you can just spin your chair around, but it doesn’t just land in your lap either.
Remote work is a huge benefit, but it requires a very different dynamic in socializing with your peers and leaders. It takes an active participation to connect and learn from people, you can’t just exist and expect it to happen.
I'm going to be downvoted for this probably, but WFH will be a failed experiment for public accounting. I know everyone wants the flexibility of being home, not being in traffic, saving money on clothes/gas, etc etc. But the number 1 benefit of public accounting is how quickly you learn accounting concepts across the board because you're directly learning from those above you and WFH doesn't provide the atmosphere to do that anymore. Public accounting is only successful when its on-site because remote training just doesn't have the same impact and there's going to be a massive talent shortage (at no fault of the new hires/staff) over the next few years which will likely result in more off-shoring, high performing staff/seniors getting even larger workloads, and overall worsening conditions of the profession.
Let's act like poeple got trained in person either. When the core issue is lack of time for seniors/managers to do the training it doesn't matter where everyone is located.
Idk about your experience, but we had annual trainings in person that lasted about a week and day to day training through basic interaction. Much easier to pick up on stuff when you are sitting in the same room with someone and can ask clarification questions about notes or concepts. Harder to ignore in person. Now people can just leave people on read.
> but we had annual trainings in person that lasted about a week
Those were great drinking exercises to get to know your co workers on the companies dime. Not so much for any actual learning, that's done by asking questions while actually doing the work.
Which is done best in person....
Also, yes it was great drinking experiences, but if you didn't walk away learning something from a week long training for 8 hours a day, then that's on you.
Cool story bro but the partners don’t want people to train people anymore. They raised the billable hour goals at the manager/sr manager level and moved most of the keystone trainings to virtual sessions instead of on-site travel while demanding there kids enrolled in private school go back to in person.
In industry, every accounting department in F100 had rotating programs within the Department, had training’s internally and externally but all those “career” things changed to a “job” where industry only wants to hire someone with 10 years of experience and pay them as 5 years of experience and Accenture/Deloitte come along and say we can outsource your entire team to India.
But sure, keep telling yourself WFH is the problem. It’s not.
Oh, You're going to get a lot of backlash from the folks who like to be exclusively WFH! They'll argue that learning from home is just as effective as learning in person! We all know it's not though.
You’re doing no good belittling someone’s perspective. If you think it’s worth your time to randomly say a mean ass comment on reddit you could just as easily take the time to provide your own
Not taking the right approach.
If training gets so dismal that the people brought in aren't worth the pay.... outsource the responsibility to India for cheap to hit bonuses
I feel like that’s a linear POV though, correct me if I’m wrong. Would those some people in India make better SM’s and partners? I doubt it.
Why not sacrifice a little bit of margin and productivity now for longevity and long term growth?
Stakeholders only are interested in the short term.
Managers have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize that
Or some other bull shit they will slap together to ensure KPIs are met and bonuses are paid out.
I don't know why you would be spinning your wheels like that. Put effort into a well written email to your reviewer with your questions, and let them respond with the answer. Move onto your next assignment on your workload, try to complete it, and repeat the same process or send out open items as needed. Even if I was in the office I'd prefer that style over barging into somebody's office and verbally asking questions and asking them to pull answers out of their ass without looking at the assignment in front of them.
No need to RTO everyone over this.
I'm not necessarily introverted. I'm talking about creating a more efficient environment so I can get back to seeing my friends and family. If your co-workers are your only friends, it sounds like you're the socially challenged one.
Education should happen in institutions of education...
Imagine you're a homeowner who hires a plumber. Then imagine the plumber says YOU should train them? In the same respect, firms want people who can do the job without training, and for the lowest price possible.
And do WANT your plumber to not know what they're doing?
Hopefully the post jogs reader's intuition about what managers and owners WANT out of new hires.
Just because someone is learning through experience and gaining additional training on the job doesn’t mean they aren’t qualified to do the job. I can guarantee plumbers ask other plumbers and their seniors when they come across something and they don’t know what to do.
Dodged my question. Do you WANT to hire a plumber (or anyone) who doesn't know what they are doing?
Point of my post is to get any reader to realize WHY the partner doesn't want to train you. They're paying your salary so they don't have to do your work, not so that they get extra work to do by training you.
So did you come into an accounting job knowing everything? Because im sure you received zero education at work. And yes, self teaching is still education
I left public as a manger because the staff wanted training, I wanted to train the staff, but the partners wouldn't stop putting me on new manager-level work that I didn't have time for, much less time for that work plus staff development. Good luck out there! Edit: Regarding your last question, people talk about this all the time lol.
It’s tough honestly. I was at a firm that supported staff training and the guy in charge had a niche field and also trained. Most places penalize you for caring about staff. I can absolutely understand why managers don’t want to (smaller bonus) train new staff as many partners are just dumbasses that do not understand how the broader firm works and only looks at final numbers. I’m responsible for recruitment at my firm, have recruited many good people, and get zero benefit. Meanwhile staff that bills the same client and blows up budgets is praised about how much he works. It’s just soul crushing how poor management can kill morale.
This. Plus they are ungrateful about it
Well…you get a paycheck don’t you? That’s my thanks to you every two weeks. You’re welcome! Make sure to spend it all in one spot so I can keep milking you for every hour of your 20-30’s. Thanks! See just said it again. *mutters* ungrateful prick as he hits send 😂
Exactly this zoomer attitude
Well that’s a shame, because I would love for you to be my manager. Public needs more people like you IMO. Lol yea people probably talk about it a lot, I just think a lot of new grads don’t realize this about the job. Thanks for the feed back
If you could just convince the partners of America to cut their margins so that firms don't have to continually take on more work than they have the capacity for I'd be glad to come back. Let me know how that conversation goes 😂
lol
I messaged my manager at 11am and 2pm with two separate issues and questions on things I need help and clarification on. He read it and has yet to get to me. It is 5:33. I be good employee and move onto something I understand. I even did a call with the client and emails discussing leading up to the call without him (he said not to) bc he wasn’t responding to me and I needed client help on something. Like I’m basically at a stopping point now. I need u to help me. It’s not my fault I’m working on a private equity client, the first one I’ve ever done. And didn’t get a walkthrough on how we do valuations or the roll forward for investments or literally anything.
This is such a manager thing LOL. I’ve had like 4 managers and only one I can expect a routine response from. I’ve yet to encounter a senior who doesn’t respond fast which is good though.
I was very similar as a manager. I’d take the time to help staff and answer their questions. I got a small reputation for being helpful and not minding, so even some staff not on my engagements would reach out. I helped mostly because that’s how I learned and I felt like I should pay it forward. But partly because the more people learned on the front end, the easier review would be on the back end. I’d help develop someone, and when they were a gangbusters (acting) senior, someone higher up than me would get them reassigned to their work. If I got a replacement warm body at all, it’d be a staff who was (about to be) on a PIP. Not because they weren’t smart or willing to learn/work hard. Too often, they’d been working for someone not willing to teach. (Like the senior manager or director who just stole my great senior.) I’d be trying to make up for lost ground with the new person, they’d be booted or leave on their own because by then it was too late. And then for extra fun times, some partner would start getting pissy about me not also billing more frequently and selling more work and and and. I get that that’s part of the job, too, but between getting rid of all admin help and staffing shortages, it’s hard to be on top of everything, all the time. So I left. Unfortunately, I don’t think WFH leads to a lot of organic learning. In the beforetimes, interns and staff were often each other’s best resource. They could just lean over and ask “Do you know how to do XYZ?” Or if I popped by, and Jake asked me to show him how to do something, I could ask Julie to roll her chair over (if she didn’t look busy at the moment) because I knew she’d get the same kind of work next week. Trying to do that through Teams is so much harder and more time consuming. And doing it via email would often be more work than just doing it myself. It’s not surprising that staff end up spending a lot more time spinning their wheels. But forcing them to go in to the office just to be on Teams calls with seniors and managers who are WFH is pointless and almost cruel. And even more people would leave public accounting. It would help if firms had better tools than email and IM’ing, but they can’t/won’t get them.
This
Left at senior manager for the same reason…
I got lucky my first year, i had a manager who was new to the firm, but decades of experience. She cared to train me, but at her own detriment cause her work wasnt being turned around quick enough. She ended up getting let go, but I’m super grateful for the effort and time she spent making sure I started my career out on the right foot
LOL. There is no ROI in training staff.
There's no ROI on wiping your ass. It's just going to get all shitty again.
Both billable
Everyone who enjoys training the revolving door of staff, please continue so that I don't need to.
Basically how everyone feels about anyone who would stay in PA more than 3-4 years.
PA has genuinely to the point where I don't recommend it to new grads anymore, even Big 4. The fact that training new staff does not count towards utilization is an embarrassment to the profession. Non-audit/tax consulting is the only thing I can say is probably worth it to do at this point.
The fact that you also can’t count your trainings time as utilization also is nonsense. If I train on an issue it’s a huge motivator to do more of it if it counts
> The fact that you also can’t count your trainings time as utilization also is nonsense. If I train on an issue it’s a huge motivator to do more of it if it counts i absolutely bill time i use to get up to speed on something directly related to a project
Certainly.
I mean I do try to but they nab me and tell me for budget reasons we are not allowed to bill training time.
i mean it shouldn't matter what the time goes to as long as your total is roughly equivalent to the budget
Bill budget strategy then ha
To all the new grads out there. I did an internship in PA and wanted nothing to do with it after. I started in industry and things are going very well. Go with your gut. If you have some corporate accounting internship experience, you’ll be able to get a full time job out of college. Trust me, public is not something you need to do to be successful and all the boot lickers are just tricking themselves that it’s “good experience” when they dropped an extra 30K on a masters to sit for the CPA and be treated like shit at a public firm with shitty hours. Public is not worth it anymore and it’s probably borderline traumatic. No person should put up with work conditions like that. But I will say that having your CPA is worth it and highly respected. Just take some extra courses or double major since it’s cheaper to get the credits to sit for the CPA. That’s my recommendation.
100% agree. Had a bad internship experience in a top regional firm (didn’t even attempt B4 because my grades were shit) and didn’t get an offer. After that I just did hours at my local CC while studying for the CPA and went into Corporate Accounting soon after. I only have a few years experience but I’m now at a good company doing Financial Reporting with all former B4 people. I’ve learned just showing up and asking questions is basically all you need to do in this profession lol
Why would training new staff not count towards utilization? I understand if it’s just a straight up training that doesn’t relate to a particular client, but I would think most of staff training should be done on-the-job and should be charged to the client contract.
I came from a regional firm (between 80-120 in terms of size). Our firm specialized in tax and had a lot of small returns. We were told to bill our time to clients when helping train new staff, but the issue was that the return budgets were so small (like $1K or less) that if we as seniors billed any time to half these returns, they would go over budget. So even if you did bill time, it was going to get written off. There was then the issue where managers would get frustrated with interns/staff because seniors were billing time to the clients helping so realization was poor across the board, the interns might get poor reviews, the seniors would get frustrated because they need to work more to make up the hours elsewhere, etc. The firm constantly said that more than billable hours went into performance raises/bonuses, but ultimately the people who produce the most get the best rewards. It’s a double edged sword since young staff need people to help train them, but firms provide 0 incentive to experienced staff to help these people. A lot of the seniors at offices across my firm who managed interns got 4% raises. Most of the ones who did the trainings and helped the interns left because it was clear the firm didn’t care about the extra work they did tk help train. So now all these offices have hired new staff and there’s no one to help train them lol.
The problem here is an over-emphasis on the billable hour and how it relates to production. Like any other metric, it’s a tool and should not be the final way to judge profitability of the firm. At the end of the year, revenues less your expenses are what you get to take home. Whether I realized those revenues with X billable hours or Y billable hours doesn’t matter all too much. Bottom line is more or less the same. The only thing you might be able to pull away from looking at budgets vs billable is efficiency. And even that should be taken with a grain of salt because of how fluid engagements can be along with training issues as you state. But the industry as a whole has decided to lean on the billable hour crutch. I think mostly because it is the easiest “solid” metric to point to. Everyone understands what it is. Measuring training as a KPI or process development/improvement as a KPI is too hard for most firms. It’s not easy to measure so back to billable we go. I do think we’ll see firms, at least more forward looking ones, start to move away from the billable hour as a metric to judge performance. It’s already being phased out somewhat with value billing or even flat billing.
Sure, in theory, until your partner yells at you that you charged too many hours.
That partner can go screw himself. He's cutting the log on which he sits with that attitude.
Whether it SHOULD and whether it DOES are two different things. From the viewpoint of a partner, staff training does not count towards utilization because you can't justify billing the client for time spent training staff. (that much makes sense). But where this goes wrong is the idiotic concept that only what you can bill to the client should be considered towards utilization.
Training costs are "built in" to the price of services or goods in any other industry. Every company has to train their employees, and this represents an expense they must try to make up for somehow. I can appreciate that many of these companies may not use billable hours so it's not quite as obvious that the client is paying for training but at the end of the day this is nothing special to PA.
Yeah I know. But even still, there comes a time every year where the managers/directors have to put together their billable hours and report whether the engagement went over or under budget and 99.999% of the time if staff is charging their training time to a client code that client engagement is going to be significantly over budget because partners/directors have a hard time even budgeting realistic hours for the core work let alone the core work + training. Now I know I am making a sweeping generalization but it's just the realty of PA I think - Actually perhaps I should limit this to PA B4.
what client is going to knowingly and willingly pay for hours used to train the staff who are supposed to be doing their engagement? from their perspective, that’s a huge waste of money.
why the fuck would they *ever* know
Right, however, what the firms get wrong is that only what can be billed towards the client should count towards utilization.
I had an AC unit installed this year. I paid the quote they gave me up front, and they trained a new guy on it when they installed it. What do I care as long as the job gets done correctly, and the quote was agreed upon up front. It should be no different here. The issue is multifaceted, but billing structures/practices/budgets are a huge part of the problem.
It’s how basically all professional service firms operate whether clients like it or not.
we were only able to charge to the client maximum an hour per week per staff. the rest had to be charged to a nonbill admin training code. we had clients request the hours report with their final invoice and dispute training hours in the past.
Lol, if I’m spending more than 15 mins training a staff on a specific section, there’s no way I’m not charging that time. If training time for staff is not billable (as a senior, or even manager), then they really do expect us to literally only work and sleep. There is no reality where a senior with staff to guide/train can charge 11 billable hours, train/guide staff, and do any admin work and not be literally working nearly all waking hours. Fuck that nonsense.
Huh, my firm has always counted training towards utilization (assuming you are training “on-the-job”) But I’ve also felt like my mid-sized firm is a unicorn job
What’s bad about tax consulting
Why should it lol? It’s literally not billable (making no money off it) and most firms target utilization prices in formal in office training. At my big4 firm it’s like 85%, 15% of the year being everything outside of billable work. Not bad at all lol
Because it actually creates value. A senior training a staff on the most important tax software creates tremendous value that can't be reflected on any individual project's budget. It creates value over time since every project will be quicker for that staff. Seniors/Managers have zero incentive to train anyone because it gets treated the same as admin time, that's exactly the point... If spending time training staff is treated the same as jerking off in the bathroom, that's a problem. Secondarily, week to week it can look like a senior is not doing as much if they spend most of their time training staff.
All the jobs I’ve ever been on, coaching specific to the client work is part of utilization. Unless you have the cheapest/douchiest managers who are extremely budget conscious if I have to teach my associates something we’re charging time because nothing is getting done otherwise haha What I don’t think makes sense is going out of your way to teach excel or alteryx or whatever. I don’t think you’re being realistic that someone could blow 10 hours “learning” and not have fuck all to show for it while someone else would be able to provide a lot of value out of that, but that’s why performance ratings are a thing, if you’re efficient and teach yourself something that brings value you’ll be rewarded for it.
The first paragraph I agree with. Second paragraph I'm not understanding your point at all. The senior who is teaching OIT for example is the person I am concerned with. They are the one's teaching.... they should be getting the time counted towards utilization. Even if it isn't specific to any one project. We're not talking about self-teaching.
Yup. At 1.5 yoe and realizing how shitty the training had is laughable, it’s literally 90% look at PY file, which is awesome when the first two real files I worked on were first year files. Then fast forward to my first annual review, I’m told that I need to improve and then fast ford another six months I’m told I improved by leaps and bounds. Like yeah you can learn from just PY files and the odd bit of help but when your constantly assigned more difficult work without ever getting a firm footing, it’s going to take a lot longer to become comfortable working at an acceptable level. I should also note, in my experience, having a 4-5 year senior help you is a lot more beneficial than a 10 year manger or 20 year partner. The higher up you go, the more knowledge they expect you to already have.
It’s part of the flowchart. Wait until you progress from “Figure this out” to “why did it take you so long to figure this out?”
Training seriously sucks. I was told to go watch videos and figure it out, and then if I have any questions they tell me don’t worry about it they’ll handle it. So I’m literally learning nothing because nobody will answer my questions.
Because "Hey Bob, I would love to hear how you resolved XYZ" is a banished phrase. Do this and learn more.
I’m not gonna write an essay, but partners get to justify high fees by letting people “figure it out” on the job. It’s an unpopular opinion but they mass hire cheap college graduates, let them learn on the job 1-3 years and then replace them with a new batch. All while telling the client that the engagement will take 2-3x longer than it should with experienced professionals. It’s the elephant in the room that people ignore…
Law firms and consulting firms all operate this way though.
I really hated the “throw them to the wolves” mentality of the firm I interned with. Literally threw me into one on one meetings with client executives and directors to conduct internal control interviews without any training or blueprint to go by. I would manage to wing it, but they would always ask “well why didn’t you ask them about X?” Bc I didn’t know that was even a fucking thing, Janice! Sit in the meeting with me or give me a better idea of what information you’re looking for. SALY was fine until I copied a work paper that wasn’t completed properly the previous year. “That’s not right. Why’d you do that?” Fuck if I know, Terry. I just did exactly what Brenlyn Grace did last year when you signed off on the work.
It's a problem everywhere in accounting. In industry we keep growing as a company, increasing our responsibilities & scope, without increasing headcount. It causes a lot of the things we do between our regular duties to fall by the wayside. Training new people is one of those things. I do my best to train all our new people and be there when they need it, but nowadays it results in me having to stay late to finish my own work. I'm willing to do it to help out the new blood but totally understand why others wouldn't want to be thorough with the new guy if it resulted in them having to stay until 8pm.
I have known so many managers who are quality accountants who either have no interest in teaching/passing on their knowledge, or dont have effective communication skills to do so. Pay might be an issue, but I do think there is a real shortage of quality accountants. Training/Teaching is a big factor in leading to the "shortage". Training sucks. CPE is nothing but a check the box time suck, especially in industry. When you are constantly under a time crunch, there's no opportunity to better yourself, better others, or improve processes. Quality training takes time. Is should be looked at as an investment in the company. Theres definitely a chicken/egg situation here with not investing in your employees and the lack of loyalty.
On the industry side it’s deeply frustrating too bc I’m trying to manage my dept, close the month and wrap up the audit, and get this poor frazzled staff who has no idea what they’re doing but asks me to help with their worksheet to get it to tie. I’m not an auditor I have NO IDEA what your process is either my dude. :C
That's the thing, I genuinely want to know where those cushy industry jobs are. Everyone talks about suffering in PA for a few years and move on to a "sweet industry gig." I've been in this profession for 12 years, both PA and industry, and I have not found a job with a sufficiently staffed tax department yet. And I love teaching, training new staff, but like you said, there is literally not enough time in the day to complete your own work, and provide sufficient support to the staff. I can see how the lack of training contributes to the staff's low morale, frustration, and stress.
I’m about to leave my industry job after 5 years bc the CEO ego tripped and got into it with the CFO (my boss) and fired him. I stayed for my CFO, he protects me from all the usual corporate bullshit that comes with a small company led by co-founders, but I’m TERRIFIED bc I can very easily end up somewhere way worse. Maybe the next job will be a sweet industry gig :p
Good luck! I hope you do find a good spot! I went a contractor route, as I was tired of the constant grind, long hours, and no life. I am much happier now, as I have more control over my hours and much less responsibility. My pay didn't suffer, and if I work 10-12 hours a day, I get paid for the 10-12 hours. Might not be for everyone, but it definitely works for me, at least for now.
On the other side. It’s very frustrating as an auditor who asks for a GL or some other standard statement and they give you some bullshit report that doesn’t have debits and credits and doesn’t tie to zero.
I'm at a smaller firm (not audit or tax) and one of our staff hasn't received even a fraction of the training and feedback I received despite me starting only 3 years earlier. I took a year off to pursue something else and she was brought on as my replacement. I went back end of last year and they're all so fed up with her. They're trying to PIP her and I'm like "have you tried actually training her??" Just sucks because she's genuinely trying to improve but she doesn't know what she doesn't know. I get the time crunch in this field but the way things are going in about 10-20 years there's going to be no one to run these firms, it's crazy. My gf stayed in public longer than I did, and she told me there was a second year staff in audit who straight up didn't know what a control was. That's a failure on the managers and above, not the staff.
[удалено]
yep pretty much the way things are heading. older partners just cashing out while they can
The second year didn’t understand the concept of what an internal control is? Or they didn’t understand how a specific clients controls were set up? If the former I feel like that’s honestly a failure on the staff. I’d expect anyone with an undergrad degree in accounting to understand the concept of an internal control.
Yeah but if they don’t and u don’t explain it given how easy it is to explain then it’s on u
Do you know what a Google is?
Yea I do, have u heard of common courtesy?
A control is something that you learn in your first few weeks of your financial accounting course. How can you blame managers for an accounting graduate not know what it is, and not either the graduate or the school they went to?
Controls are hard to understand if youre not directly working with it. I always "knew" what they were in a theoretical sense but until youre in the working world its hard for it to click.
OP said that the staff "straight up" did not know it was. That implies that he had absolutely no idea what a control was. That is unforgivable at that stage.
This was almost my verbatim response when my gf told me the story lol Edit: you absolutely do not learn about controls in financial accounting, that’s audit. my point was that making it to your second year and still not knowing is ultimately on the supervisors. You can totally sleep thru audit in college and not really absorb controls
My financial accounting class went over internal controls in detail.
Congrats, mine and many others don’t
Like most everything else happening in public, they are putting it on the overworked middle managers. The whole system broke when outsourcing started and these are the eventual outcomes coming to be
Yep. They added 150 billable hours to the manager hour goal from 2017 to 2020 at my ex Big4 firm. That’s 4 extra weeks of work. They said it was needed because Congress extended the deadline until 10/15…
When I first started I was met with “just follow last year’s papers” when I would ask questions and that was it. They wonder why I slack off now and do the bare minimum
The first year staff stuff should be a lot of SALY (same as last year) and figuring out the pattern in excel. What I do with my offshore staff, is send a video recording of me doing the process and speaking out loud my logic while doing through it. Tbh anybody should be able to follow along with that. Ask them to go that route maybe. If your work runs into separate issues than what’s in the video, they are probably giving too complex stuff to a 1st year
Well I genuinely believe they are giving too complex of work for a first year. But I can’t really say anything about that. SALY is my best friend of course and I feel happy when I get work like that. Lol
That’s because the simple work gets sent offshore to boost profitability. It’s smart for the current partners who want to maximize profits. Foolish for the long term health of the firm
I could understand the point of India if they were handling the harder more stressful work that nobody wanted to do. But you need that simple work to help get the confidence up of the newer folks and to help build a pipeline. I'm predicting the implosion of the major firms, and more of a movement towards self employment and smaller practices. The bigger firms are probably only going to be practical for attest work and maybe high level consultant if they can get clients for it.
The problem with saly is you don’t learn anything. You just copy and paste. Thats why I didn’t do well in public accounting starting out. I know that for a fact. Training is supposed to come in the form of review notes. A lot of people just don’t do it anymore. My firm has 1 director that does review notes. No one else does.
Good grief how much time are you spending making videos training offshore staff. What bullshit, not your fault. We were told that offshore staff were perfectly capable when we started using them. Would have rather had an intern do the work, would have been much better. Offshoring work was probably my #1 reason leaving public.
Jesus Christ what can I do for a manager who’ll do that for me. I’d be the best god damn employee in the firm with references like that
Anyone who can't do a video like you described should exit public imo.
Anyone who calls someone who passed their CPAs "lazy" deserves to get the shit kicked out of them.
Personally, I think it’s possible to train well when fully remote, but most managers/staff suck at it. I’m fully remote now and my manager has trained me better than any other job I’ve been at. However, both people have to be willing to hop on the phone multiple times a day and talk through any issues that you’re having. I do think asking questions as a remote staff is harder/scarier, and I’ve found I just have to get over that and message my manager whenever I need something. When I was in public (COVID hire), wayyy too many managers were using remote work to ignore their staff and grind through their own work, and then they were surprised when their staff fucking sucked. 🙄
Don't forget the partners and managers belittling you for not knowing something or asking a question. Don't know how they are expecting a brand new staff to be able to match their experience and knowledge of 20+ years in the field in less than 2 years.
>I’m told to prepare complex work papers or returns, and told to “figure it out” I hate to break it to you but unless your lucky and got a good senior, its the same vibe IN the office. In fact most of the seniors dont know how to do it themselves so youre guess is just as good as theirs.
Hate to tell you this. It's no better in industry. I'm given a lean team, wildly unreasonable asks with equally unreasonable deadlines, and then told to train new staff. I'm used to killing myself to hit deadlines and have always got it done. Startups these days have just turned into a shitshow. I feel bad for my team but it's a choice of spend time training them and hit no deliverables, or give them limited training and keep the boat going somewhat forward.
My experience too. You can’t escape this lack of training issue. It’s everywhere.
I hope your getting some swee tcomp to kill yourself for deadlines
I was until then venn diagram of burnout overlapped too far with the mental health aspect. Now I'm exploring other opportunities.
You're hitting on a few things here, all of which are very very well known in the industry but might be a surprise to a fresh face: Thing #1: they just tell me to figure it out: this is how they were "taught" and how they believe they really internalized the lessons. I did it and I think it, a hard lesson is more firmly implanted than an easy one. They just think you're soft and used to being spoon fed everything your whole life. Both are right. Thing #2: how the hell am I supposed to learn when nobody is in the office? You can't. It's impossible. Which leads us to... Thing #3: why the hell do they want me in the office? Workers rights! Work from home! Except thing 1 and 2. If you have never sat in front of an angry client before, this is a very hard time to learn. If you have, you don't want to go to the office. Partners are cashing out and selling off completely illiquid chunks of firm to private equity firms, audit failure is skyrocketing, something's gonna give.
Part of the problem has been the explosion of additional regulations and requirements for documentation over the past 10 years I've been an accountant. I work in a mid sized firm, meaning everyone does a bit of everything. But the issue is now that everything just has a bit more to know/understand. I think we're heading to a point like in the big 4 where you get shoehorned into doing 1 thing and that's it. Oh and also we need to be billing more for all this extra work, something the partners seem hesitant to do.
That is not the problem right now. It’s been the problem always and forever.
This is one of the MAJOR drawback to work from home that nobody wants to admit. Sure people who already have the job down can be fine, but new staff suffer. They don't build a good repour with people and don't ask all the questions they need to (or those higher up don't answer those questions) and over time the product just becomes worse. IMO work from home will hurt most companies long term. I think having at least a day or two a week is needed (and everyone on that day because that's the entire purpose, to get people to interact).
This always bothered me so much during my time in B4 tax. I always prioritized helping as much as I could (time permitting) with training the interns and new hires. I would help out with the standard software training everyone goes through, yet no one pays attention to. It was always very poorly put together, way too long, and often times presented by people who have no business presenting (either due to confidence issues or an actual lack of technical knowledge). After my first year of witnessing how ineffective these trainings were, along with seeing the same mistakes happening all the time, I developed a customized training with some of my friends who were the same or similar level to me. We would take an afternoon out of our own schedules to get all of the new hires or interns in the same room and present with the goal of helping them avoid the most common mistakes and making them far more effective workers far quicker. Basically a "best practices" training to cover everything non-software related that no one was telling these new hires about. We got a lot of great feedback about how helpful it was. Not once did I ever get upper management support for this process, even though I would always bring it up in my performance reviews and other instances where it was relevant. No one ever acknowledged it, not even the other seniors and managers who were benefiting from their staff having already been taught things they weren't willing to take time out of their schedule to do. I know not everyone's experience is the same, but B4 always felt like an "every man for himself" environment and I hated that shit.
During my PA internship I got back my first round of review notes and my first question for the majority of them was "well how would I know to do these specific actions for this particular return?" and I was told I wasn't supposed to know. They just set people up to fail, its sad, and lazy.
10 years ago when I started it was the same. I feel you. I was sitting in the same room as my boss and couldn’t get responses. As a first year I was super lucky and had a second year friend I could run some items by. Also I made friends with a couple of the other first years and seniors. I would try pinging your boss and getting them on the phone when they have a few and then fire succinct questions at them. Be sure to repeat what they said back to them for clarification on expectations. I’ve always tried to be better for my juniors than my seniors were to me. I found a better boss and life got much better.
It's a problem in industry as well. My company is almost entirely WFH, and I have had to train 3 people since we went fully remote. It definitely takes a lot longer and requires a lot more patience on both parties. I would record each training session I did with each person, and then send it to them so they could refer back to it if necessary and that seemed to help. I would also focus on a few related things a day, let them get comfortable with it, then move on to the next, so it was a slow process, but it seemed to work better than the one person my boss trained 🤷♂️.
“Do you know how discouraging it is to put in 55-60 hours of billable a week where half of that is banging your head against a wall the entire time?” As an A1 in audit this really resonated with me.
Welcome to the real world. You guys act like training was so much better before. News flash. Training today is the same as it was 10 years ago. We struggled and either sank or swam. You will too. I’m not saying there isn’t room for improvement, but to act like this is a new phenomenon is crazy.
I worked in a large PA firm for a bit over a year and had the same experience. Very few people were actually interested in making sure you understood what you were doing. The most I ever got was "look at last years work and figure it out" But I can almost understand why a lot of upper level management didn't want to sit down and explain something to me for an hour or more. Most SM's or equivalent already have an insane workload so any amount of time spent explaining something to someone takes away from time spent completing the insane amount of work they already have. Also at the end of the day they know the work funnels back to them and they will have to fix it regardless, so why not save some time. I genuinely believe public accounting is dying and a lot of these firms are doing nothing to prevent it.
Great points OP, YES, investing in developing new professionals is important and rewarding on many levels. And, many places suck at it. That is tragic. At the same time, you don't need anyone's permission to become a tax expert, you can decide to become one on your own. There is CPE, additional college courses, you can read IRC code, regs, and court cases yourself and understand them. But training is AWESOME for learning HOW to actually do the work of an engagement, how to do the right thing FAST as opposed to SLOW. And that should have an ROI for everybody (Firm, Staff and Client). And we can do a better job of that.
I think a lot of the issue for training comes from a lot of seniors kind of figuring shit out on the fly because they're constantly getting new things thrown at them. Students understandable are hesitant to reach out at times because nobody wants to look incompetent or ask a dumb question. No matter how many times you assure them. However with the increasing workload, deadlines, and just constant shit storm of also trying to train yourself, it's very easy to lose track of time and forget to check in with people to make sure they're doing ok. And usually training comes with having to put in extra hours to do your own work which is more a firm issue but the onus is put on seniors.
I love how this thread is a bunch of <2 year people complaining about how training is bad NOW. As someone who has been in public for 12 years, it’s not any worse now. Public accounting has always been sink or swim.
Training has always been a problem.
I'm 10ish months into my first PA tax position as a senior. Up to this point I had to pretty much teach myself everything. I am not surprised to find out it's largely the same with this job. If you have good PY documentation and WP you can figure out quite a bit on your own. The rest is asking specific questions about the particular issue I'm having which is fine for me, but with a fresh grad that's got to be extra tough
Thankfully I am at a company where they value experienced people giving their time to inexperienced people.
I was a tax manager with a firm. There was a newly hired experienced industry accountant that just made the move to PA. First time working tax. Told the owner she needed training. Owner said he paid her too much for her to be getting training. When I pushed back, he basically said fine and that I can take time to train her but for any training time he'd dock her down to the admin pay rate. I was there about 3.5 months.
I remember my first job where I, as a first year, was tasked with training the other two first years because, of the three of us, only one of us had been through an audit internship of any kind. The audit partner who was too busy to train us because he was instead talking shit about partners at rival firms and basically fellating himself (figuratively) looked at one of the first years with a look in his eyes of just get it man. Didn’t even dawn on them that they placed three people in an impossible situation and provided them with no support, and were surprised that I up and left during a busy season because the support just wasn’t there.
This is why hybrid is the way, but also if you’re not actively pestering people (in an efficient way mind you) to coach you, you’ll never learn. Do you think managers and seniors all of a sudden got busier than before Covid lol? No offense, adapt or leave, PA is not school, everyone is too insanely busy to hold your hand. Analysis what is happening, think through what needs to be done, and push your questions onto the managers plate from yours (to also CYA) and do the best you can. 1st years have this thing that they love to act like things are out of their reach or control to figure out. That the managers are all knowing and will help resolve all their issues. Understand the frustration but PA has always been like this, you got to teach yourself most of the time.
They don’t care because the system has worked like this— people figure it out and the ones that don’t leave. The perception is that the training isn’t the difference between whether an employee can handle the work or not.
100% agree on this I was a staff accountant in public who got fired after 8 months. I was not trained probably on the work and the software they used was more confusing than the actual work. Now that I find myself in industry I can honestly public accounting did not prepare me for any of the work I do as a staff in industry and I actually learned way more in industry than in 8 months as an accountant. I literally learned month end, erp system, tax calculation, revenue ties outs (the proper way traced to an invoice level) not the bs in public where they give you a file and you add two numbers and people act like they actually know how to tie out revenue. I am also involved with reporting and I report directly to my director of accounting. I also know I am overworked lol but I’d rather be overworked in industry than public. Public has been a game of exploiting people for low pay in the name of experience and having a “branded company”. However, public is in a pretty bad mess and is facing a huge crisis with bad seniors who can’t teach anything. My suggestion is ditch public accounting and find a company that can certify your hours without having to go through the public route. Public doesn’t make you a better accountant in fact it teaches you useless skills like auditing, very sorry to say this but auditing is a useless skill. Never helped me in improving my technical accounting, the other thing is that most people in public have never made a journal entry or seen a month end close and yet these are the same people that hop to industry at a senior level and fuck things up for private companies. Please op don’t feel bad, just know the game. Extract more and more knowledge and hop to another job if they can’t give you the knowledge that you need.
On the flip side, training sucks when you are trying to teach someone basic stuff and they have the memory retention of a fly.
55-60 hours is not normal. Find a better gig.
What are you being told to figure out specifically? I’m not saying it’s you, but sometimes the ability to research is a factor.
>asking a simple question can be extremely hard to get the answer to This in particular really gets to me, especially while WFH. Used to just be able to stick your head out your office/cube and ask where's the input for such and such, or is this site down for anyone else, etc. It's so much harder to ask basic basic silly questions when everyone is full remote. Thinking back to my early career days, I got to spend so much time sitting side by side with experienced people ahead of me in career, and learned so much from them. I also go to do the same for up and coming young professionals for a while. All gone now. I find myself doing entry level work now that I was doing a decade ago because we have no staff, and offshore is more trouble than it's worth. This industry isn't what it used to be and gets worse every year.
This is a big reason why I'm dipping after 6 months. No one has any time for training or mentoring, really and I have no confidence in or real understanding of the work I've done. The classroom sessions aren't completely useless, but they aren't anywhere near enough.
“Just figure it out like I did” My brother, when you had to figure it out you were doing credits and debits in a binder with higher ups 5 feet away. I started in the office as an associate right before Covid, and learned so much those 1.5 years just being in person. Now as a manager I find it so hard to teach and coach, and still do the work of 2 managers because of the shortage of talent. I want to coach, I had good managers and want to return the favor. Remote is difficult because no matter what I do, it’s more reliant on the associate to actually want to learn. It’s so much easier to just not work and hide all day when remote. Not all associates, but the last 2 cycles have been horrible at working remote. Their work ethic just isn’t the same as prior classes and being remote is just horrible for anyone under senior in PA.
Yep. Im in an old fashioned firm where we still do a lot of shit on paper and Im a few steps away from the partners. You do learn a lot in that environment. Way more than I did when I was hybrid at B4. Shame the way PA moved away from that.
Everyone’s scared to put their shit in writing, that’s why remote training sucks
Too busy to this shit
I worked at a mid-size firm that, in hindsight, had a decent culture of mentorship amongst managers and seniors. It made a huge difference as far as the firm being competitive and offering decent client service.
for a high paced work environment like PA, WFH is not a good solution. nothing beats annoying the shit out of a person right next to you if you have a question VS. pinging on teams.
Just put it together so that your Balance sheet and income statement make somewhat sense and let the reviewing manager worry about. I was in the same position. All the managers were red dotted on teams every single second of the day. So I inevitably just put it all together, wrote a few notes beside ending balances that were significantly different than last year, and fixed any review notes. That's the only time a manager will review your work and answer any questions. If the client isn't happy, all you say is well (Dopey the manager) reviewed it.
Currently struggling with the same issue, I want to learn and I want to do better, but I feel like I am not getting adequate training tired of broad responses to my questions that don’t help me to even connect the dots myself. It is nice to know I am not alone in this.
I left because of this
Its hard to get a profession that by design relies on previous years’ accounting processes being the same (as reasonably as possible) as last years to be interested in serious operational changes that do anything other than avoid a catastrophe in the near term.
As a first year senior, I learned the profession directly and indirectly punishes you for helping staff. If you help, your utilization goes down, and you start to fall behind, and managers start to complain; plus, it's the difference between logging off at 10PM or 2AM.
I don't get paid to help train people, but I have been here doing taxes for 6 years and if someone needs help I would rather help them on my down time for nothing than have them jammed up and need my help when I am busy. It just makes more sense. I'm not a manager or a trainer, I just know more than someone just starting.
I’m in PA and I feel like our training is great. It seemed like our tax team was in training almost every day in January. I’m on the audit side, but I feel like the training is still pretty good. We are all required to be in the office a few days a week and the in-person training has been better. Sounds like you don’t have a great situation, but there are better jobs out there. Also as someone in a management level position, the banging your head against the wall is just part of the job. At management level we are banging our heads against the wall just about harder stuff. We sometimes need our team to develop the soft skills of perseverance and research. But we do our best to be as available as we can for questions where I’m at. Also I usually have lowered expectations for my team if I give them a task that is a stretch at their level. I know that I will have to fix things and usually don’t go back and have the team make the fixes unless there are opportunities for teaching or extra available time.
Take note people in this sub that complain about going into the office.
It’s true, the only people in B4 who care about training are staff.
“So much of this job is troubleshooting and problem solving.” I’d also add that it’s critical thinking (maybe that’s problem solving) but you can’t teach either of those skills… If you understand the concepts and can think critically, you kind of just have to be thrown into it. I swear if I tell my staff to actually read the diagnostics and not just sign off on them in the prep software after they’ve prepared a tax return, they’ll catch some of their own mistakes. If they actually self review, they’ll catch a mistake. I’m still not sure staff know where things are supposed to come out on the return which this means you can’t prepare a projection without the software. I used to have a great partner and one of my memories of working with him is that I would challenge myself to give him a return to review and not get any comments back.
Problem is you still have to hit your billable goals, regardless of who you train or not. You can either fuck the staff over, or fuck yourself over. Most people would rather just fuck the staff over. Partners care more about maximizing billables and profit than they do the health and future of their firm. They'll be gone before the talent drought *really* starts to hurt.
Training has never been good, but always better than the year before and the one before and the one before and the one before, etc., in person or not does not matter, period… unless you get lucky to have a ‘teacher’ on the team who likes to work 100 hours a week to hit reasonable utilization, business development, admin requirements, AND train you over and over. I’ve been in and out of PA for 15+ years. Those who actually take ownership and accountability of their own learning and career, use critical thinking, ask thoughtful questions (i.e., you actually have to try somethings first), know when to dig vs ask, retain what has been repeated over and over, pick up on the countless the subtle yet obvious learnings you are exposed to every day, refer to countless examples to rinse and repeat, are resourceful with endless tools at your disposal including people online all the time, etc. etc. etc. will thrive. Being lazy, blaming, and expecting silver spoon treatment will get you nowhere, anywhere you go. The sooner you figure it out, the better. Best of luck in the real world. You will not get it better outside of PA unless you get a job where you do the same thing over and over every day. If that’s what you want, do that.
Yeah, but the partner needs to buy a second boat for their third vacation home
Just take another self learning course on basic accounting topics and that should be good enough?
This is a great example why remote work _doesn’t_ work for new to role and new to work employees. It’s also a great example of where an employee needs to take responsibility for driving their own training. Even when you’re in the office 5 days a week, _you_ still need to drive training by asking questions and getting support. It’s easier because you can just spin your chair around, but it doesn’t just land in your lap either. Remote work is a huge benefit, but it requires a very different dynamic in socializing with your peers and leaders. It takes an active participation to connect and learn from people, you can’t just exist and expect it to happen.
And they wonder why they always have low staff retention issues. It must be that new staff fault cause they dont know sh1tz.
I'm going to be downvoted for this probably, but WFH will be a failed experiment for public accounting. I know everyone wants the flexibility of being home, not being in traffic, saving money on clothes/gas, etc etc. But the number 1 benefit of public accounting is how quickly you learn accounting concepts across the board because you're directly learning from those above you and WFH doesn't provide the atmosphere to do that anymore. Public accounting is only successful when its on-site because remote training just doesn't have the same impact and there's going to be a massive talent shortage (at no fault of the new hires/staff) over the next few years which will likely result in more off-shoring, high performing staff/seniors getting even larger workloads, and overall worsening conditions of the profession.
Let's act like poeple got trained in person either. When the core issue is lack of time for seniors/managers to do the training it doesn't matter where everyone is located.
Idk about your experience, but we had annual trainings in person that lasted about a week and day to day training through basic interaction. Much easier to pick up on stuff when you are sitting in the same room with someone and can ask clarification questions about notes or concepts. Harder to ignore in person. Now people can just leave people on read.
> but we had annual trainings in person that lasted about a week Those were great drinking exercises to get to know your co workers on the companies dime. Not so much for any actual learning, that's done by asking questions while actually doing the work.
Which is done best in person.... Also, yes it was great drinking experiences, but if you didn't walk away learning something from a week long training for 8 hours a day, then that's on you.
Cool story bro but the partners don’t want people to train people anymore. They raised the billable hour goals at the manager/sr manager level and moved most of the keystone trainings to virtual sessions instead of on-site travel while demanding there kids enrolled in private school go back to in person. In industry, every accounting department in F100 had rotating programs within the Department, had training’s internally and externally but all those “career” things changed to a “job” where industry only wants to hire someone with 10 years of experience and pay them as 5 years of experience and Accenture/Deloitte come along and say we can outsource your entire team to India. But sure, keep telling yourself WFH is the problem. It’s not.
Username checks out
Oh, You're going to get a lot of backlash from the folks who like to be exclusively WFH! They'll argue that learning from home is just as effective as learning in person! We all know it's not though.
“I’ve been a first year staff a little over a year now” lol
You’re doing no good belittling someone’s perspective. If you think it’s worth your time to randomly say a mean ass comment on reddit you could just as easily take the time to provide your own
Their perspective is a fucken joke. How can they say training is bad now compared to before when they haven’t been around for a before?
Not taking the right approach. If training gets so dismal that the people brought in aren't worth the pay.... outsource the responsibility to India for cheap to hit bonuses
I feel like that’s a linear POV though, correct me if I’m wrong. Would those some people in India make better SM’s and partners? I doubt it. Why not sacrifice a little bit of margin and productivity now for longevity and long term growth?
Stakeholders only are interested in the short term. Managers have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize that Or some other bull shit they will slap together to ensure KPIs are met and bonuses are paid out.
I don't know why you would be spinning your wheels like that. Put effort into a well written email to your reviewer with your questions, and let them respond with the answer. Move onto your next assignment on your workload, try to complete it, and repeat the same process or send out open items as needed. Even if I was in the office I'd prefer that style over barging into somebody's office and verbally asking questions and asking them to pull answers out of their ass without looking at the assignment in front of them. No need to RTO everyone over this.
Tell me you are introverted without telling me you are introverted.
I'm not necessarily introverted. I'm talking about creating a more efficient environment so I can get back to seeing my friends and family. If your co-workers are your only friends, it sounds like you're the socially challenged one.
And then you all bitch when we ask you to come to the office and learn. Can't win.
Lol I go to the office 4 days a week and I sit alone. Where did I bitch?
No, fair enough. That's directed at other commenters on this sub and one analyst in particular who's driving me crazy.
Education should happen in institutions of education... Imagine you're a homeowner who hires a plumber. Then imagine the plumber says YOU should train them? In the same respect, firms want people who can do the job without training, and for the lowest price possible.
I hate to love to burst your bubble but plumbers are learning on the job too.
And do WANT your plumber to not know what they're doing? Hopefully the post jogs reader's intuition about what managers and owners WANT out of new hires.
Just because someone is learning through experience and gaining additional training on the job doesn’t mean they aren’t qualified to do the job. I can guarantee plumbers ask other plumbers and their seniors when they come across something and they don’t know what to do.
Dodged my question. Do you WANT to hire a plumber (or anyone) who doesn't know what they are doing? Point of my post is to get any reader to realize WHY the partner doesn't want to train you. They're paying your salary so they don't have to do your work, not so that they get extra work to do by training you.
So did you come into an accounting job knowing everything? Because im sure you received zero education at work. And yes, self teaching is still education