Viability of accountancy as rewarding career

[noman]

I would like discussion on this topic..as it has been highlighted in numerous other threads too..


Is it viable for students to join this field now??
We know that thousands if not tens of thousands of students are involved with ACCA in pakistan..

The number of CA inter students has also increased a lot during last few years..


but the quetion is there enough space for all these people to assimilate in the economy in near future?

Lots of people are not finding articleships/internship...

as far as the job market is concerned..i personally know many people who have completed articles from Big4 and are jobless for atleast 6-8 months since they completed..most of whom are CA final stage or ACCA qualified..

if the situation is such now...what will it be 3-4 years from now?? when the thousands of ACCA graduate?

Hasn't it reached the saturation level now as was the case with
o MCS and computer sciences in late nineties....?

Should the upcoming students join this profession keeping in mind all the above factors?

(i have not mentioned the enormous numbers of M.Com, MBA Fiance students yet...)

Comments are welcome..

[arsenal.gooner]

noman, my personal view is that it depends a lot on the quality of the individual. just compare inter students with a'levels. you will see a lot of difference. its not that i am degrading inter students (of course there are very good students in inter as well but i am talking about the majority). its just for comparison purposes.

Similarly, a few of my friends are CA inter, a few are ACCA qualified and many of them cant even communicate in English. so i think it depends a lot on how you present yourself or should i say, "sell yourself"

As far as your comparison with MCS goes, i think finance is something that every company needs to have. no matter what. not every company needs an IT engineer but accounting is must for every company. similarly, there are industries like banking and investment that solely rely on the quality of their finance professionals like CA, MBA, ACCA etc.

Yes the economy is not good but i think that there is a lot of potential in the Pakistani market and it is bound to grow at an exponential rate at some stage. furthermore, you are also discounting the effect of the credit crunch and financial meltdown that has shattered even the best of economies. its just a ripple effect that we are experiencing here. Plus you have a country that is spending billions and billions on a war so economy really has no room to grow. But this will get better inshallah.

Rest assured, one thing is for sure is that only the best survive in the most competitive economies.

Rgds,

Arsenal

[wicky]

but its true that job market is not that gud 4 any body at present

[noman]

The thing is...if you have one job and 30 applicants...of whom at least 20 speak good english and 10 are very competent also.....still there will be a lot of competition...10 people to 1 job is quite a lot saturation i guess..don't you??

the MCS remark was not about the degree..but actually how all of a sudden everyone jumped in on that field and it became oversaturated with people having to opt for other careers...

[arsenal.gooner]

when i say speaking english.. i mean really really good fluent english. not just speaking but speaking with ease. and there are very few students around specially in CA and ACCA who can do that. i myself am a student and i know wht i am talking about.

you are right that everybody is just jumping on the finance bandwagon, but then again, i think equal number of people are still going for IT, marketing and engineering.

i think one of the biggest reasons why there are so many acca students is that jis ko kahin admission nahin milta woh acca mein aajata hai and this is a fact. furthermore, 99% of the acca students that i have met up till now want to go abroad. so they enter into acca thinking that they will be able to settle abroad (which is crap and freaks me out). so this again plays a big factor in students entering this field.

but there will always be a finance director, an internal auditor, accountant, manager etc. Positions will always be there. the cream rises to the top

Rgds,