One of my former students approached me recently to ask for some career advice on behalf of her husband. He's an accounting graduate who has dabbled in tax and is looking ahead to decide what is next in life. He asked about law school and various possible career paths.
It got me thinking about my professional life. Having recently changed jobs, I reflected on the paths I've followed up to this point. After sending off my response and sharing it with Heather, she suggested that it might make a good blog post. I agreed, and I'm posting it here with a few slight edits and redactions.
So, dear readers, here you will find my thoughts and advice on venturing forth into a professional career. A lot of the thoughts in the first half are specific to tax practice, legal practice, and CPA practice, but perhaps you will find them interesting even if you're not interested in one of those fields. The second half of the letter has more general advice/thoughts.
Enjoy.
[Name Redacted],
Thank you for reaching out to me. I hope some of my thoughts will prove useful to you. I remember well how starting out in professional life can be a confusing time - one where I had far more questions than I had answers to, where the future seemed very cloudy, and where things often didn't seem to be working out the way I hoped or expected them to.
First, a few things about the life of a CPA in tax practice. You've expressed some interest in tax accounting and I can completely understand that. I seem to remember that you had an internship a summer or two ago (with one of the big 4 maybe? Or Moss Adams or someone?) and that should have given you a pretty good taste of what is involved in tax compliance work on the accounting side. I have thoroughly enjoyed my almost 5-year tenure as a tax preparer/tax researcher in public accounting. The work is (almost) always interesting, there is some room for creativity some of the time, and the work is also quite valuable - something that is ultimately very important. Now, there are plenty of niches (especially at larger firms) where you could pigeon-hole yourself into a very boring area of practice. That is not a fate you want to consign yourself to. But it's an easy fate to avoid if you're vocal about your interests.
For most of the year the pace of life is very agreeable and you'll have lots of flexibility for vacations and family events. That is nice. Also, though the people in public accounting are often nerdy, but it's a kind of nerdy that I find endearing and enjoyable.
There are some definite drawbacks to this profession. I found that busy season didn't get any easier each year. In fact, it seemed to get harder and harder on my family as the kids grew. Working 70-80 hour weeks for 2-3 months and then again in little bursts in September and October was very draining on my wife and it was hard to watch her experience that. As I looked around I noticed that so many of the people who were long-standing managers, senior managers, and even partners were individuals who did not have children and the demands of a family life - not to mention the demands of church callings and responsibilities. (To be fair, a lot of the partners did have children, but far fewer people - as a whole - had families at home than I think you would ordinarily find in the general population). I think some spouses are naturally equipped to endure this reality well and other spouses are not. I'm not sure how [your wife] would respond as your family grows and your responsibilities increase, but regardless the strain will be real and you'll need to have a good plan in place and be very sensitive to handling those stresses.
If you're considering a career as a tax attorney, this too can be a great option. Law school is a daunting undertaking any way you slice it, as it is a very expensive and demanding 3-year endeavor. When I went through law school I did so as a father of 2 very young girls and I worked more than part-time during almost my entire tenure (I had a part-time law job, I taught dance at PBD, and I was the maintenance guy at the small apartment complex where we lived). It was a busy time. But it was a great education and I enjoyed the practice of law for the couple of years before I switched to accounting. It is an opportunity to work with (almost always) very smart people in a challenging environment. If you focus on tax, you'll work with some exceptionally smart people. My tax classes were some of the hardest in law school simply because of the complexity of the subject matter involved. Having a strong accounting background will give you a solid leg-up (depending on where you focus your practice). In order to land a really good tax position in this profession, you will want to strongly consider an additional year of education (ideally immediately following law school) where you pursue an LLM degree (tax). There are so many tax-related things you can do in the legal profession that finding work shouldn't be a problem for you. Depending on what you enjoy doing, you'll have opportunities to work in tax and estate planning, tax controversy, international taxation, or any number of other specialties.
The education makes for a long haul if you go this route (and you could spend a long time paying off education debt), but it's a great opportunity to improve your mind and to acquire new skills. Plus, a legal career is a great springboard to a huge number of different professional options farther down the road.
If you do go this route, do REALLY well on the LSAT exam and get into the best school you possibly can. The better the academic credentials you can get, the better your career options will be. I can't emphasize that enough.
As far as law vs. accounting as a tax practice, I found that I really just enjoyed the numbers and the forms of a CPA practice as opposed to the purely legal focus of a law practice. Pretty simple explanation, but I think it boils down to that for me. I really enjoy doing research and handling tax controversies (IRS examinations) from time to time, but ultimately I like being where the rubber meets the road in the preparation of the forms and the schedules. I'm probably kind of weird.
Some general thoughts not related specifically to your career choice. As I embark on my third career presently (at the ripe age of 34) it is very easy to look back and see that the most important factors in my professional satisfaction have had less to do with the specific type of work that I've been engaged in and far more to do with the environment in which I have operated. In two of my last four jobs I have worked under and alongside individuals with poor (I might even say VERY poor) interpersonal skills. And poor people management skills. This affected me more than I would have guessed. And it is something that took me a while to recognize. By contrast, in the other two jobs I have operated in workplaces where I was treated with respect, supported, trusted, and even empowered. For what it's worth, I have experienced and observed that individuals who are drawn to the legal profession (and especially - for some reason - those who do well enough to end up in management positions) tend to be some of the worst managers you will find. Obviously there are lots and lots of exceptions to this rule, but I think it is nonetheless a rule that holds true far more often than one would wish. I don't say that to discourage you; it's simply an observation that I would want to know if I were in your shoes. Your experience (and the experiences of others) may differ significantly.
Piggybacking on that idea, I have found that a miserable professional life (as much as I try to separate it) inevitably bleeds over and affects my personal life. The stresses and frustrations you carry around at work do not evaporate when you walk in the door at home at the end of the day. While no job is perfect and you'll ALWAYS have some degree of stress, an undue amount of negative stresses will inevitably accumulate and affect your interactions with your friends and family. Whatever you've got going at work and no matter what your paycheck looks like, it isn't worth that kind of a headache.
I have come to appreciate that I could ultimately be happy doing any number of things professionally, so long as I am surrounded by fantastic co-workers, managers, subordinates, etc. When you are young and starting out it is so difficult to take advice like this when you feel like your options are limited and finding/landing ANY job can be so difficult and daunting. To that I would say that it's important to keep your ear to the ground. Sometimes you will find yourself in a position where you'll need to take whatever decent opportunity presents itself even if it is not ideal. While you're doing that other opportunities will slowly rise to the surface and if you're paying attention you'll be able to make something out of them. A friend might mention an intriguing possibility in a field/company that you had never before considered and it might feel just right. Or a volunteer opportunity might unexpectedly blossom into an excellent full-time position. There are a million unpredictable ways that these things will happen as you move forward in life but if you're patient and you're paying attention you won't miss them.
I can't say there's a lot I would change about the strange, winding road my career path has taken. Rather than regret my mistakes (and there have been mistakes - sometimes significant ones) I choose to own them, learn, and move on. I know I will make more mistakes as I move forward, but along the way I'm going to continue to improve and get better and better and making decisions and being effective. You're going to make mistakes, take the wrong jobs, make the wrong decisions in those jobs, exercise bad judgment, and just generally screw up from time to time. Don't fool yourself into thinking that if you think things through and pray hard enough you'll be able to avoid that reality. Accept the fact, go out and make your mistakes and appreciate what you've learned and then move on to better (smaller, more well-managed) mistakes in the future. You'll find that sometimes - usually because of those mistakes - you'll have all the tools you need at just the right time to make the right decision and do something really amazing and effective.
I wish you the best of luck. I don't necessarily think you have any really bad career choices in front of you (depending on your personality) as an accounting education is a great springboard to so many things. You have a beautiful and dedicated wife who is going to work hard to make you happy for the rest of your life and I trust you're going to respond in kind (which is to say that the most important pieces of your life are already in place). You're all primed for amazing success.
Matt Longhurst
