Have you and your partner/spouse both managed to have successful careers whilst raising children, or has one career suffered?

[Dr1ppin]

I keep reading that you ‘can’t have it all’ and something has to give. My husband is currently the breadwinner and works long hours but I want to start focusing on my career now (he has never stopped me and has only ever encouraged me). I just wondered how realistic it is of me to expect to be able to focus on my career whilst raising children especially if my husband works long hours? Our children are 18 months and newborn. Is it going to be one or the other for me?

[quote Chocowally]**@Guineapigbridge* @Reearry*

Re forensic accounting - do you work in that field? Ex colleagues of mine have found it quite inflexible, lots of travel, tight deadlines with long hours

With accountancy degree, consider professional qualification then pick an industry you are interested in and go in house to work to FD route. Business support functions ie finance dept non client facing often have more flexibility[/quote]

Chicowally this is me. Now that I'm quite senior in a large finance department, and paid reasonably well, I have LOADS of flexibility. Much more so than when I was training to be an auditor and attending different client sites each week.

I did sacrifice in having my children older, I'd love to have had them 5 years earlier, but a combination of being busy building career and meeting DH in my 30's put paid to those plans.

In our own personal situation, no - I chose to sacrifice career and do part time or voluntary work instead. DH by far the higher earner so made sense.

We could have “had it all” and both carried on working in our respective careers but would have had to outsource a hell of a lot. It would have had to be “full time nanny, only see the kids at weekends” type arrangement because both careers required 12hr+ working days and a lot of travel, and we didn’t want to live our lives that way. I did try to do my job part time initially and it nearly killed me-I have never been so stressed in my life as I was trying to do my job and get back in time for child care pick up and that was with only one DC.

But that’s not to say others can’t and don’t make it work. It depends hugely on what you do, who you work for (whether yourself or an employer) and how flexible work and employer or clients can be in terms of hours and so on. Massive generalisation, I realise, but friends in public sector jobs seem to have a lot more flexibility than those who work for private / large corporate companies. Sadly for many companies the notion of a work life balance remains a notion!

We have both managed to keep our careers going on a similar trajectory, but I guess it's a bit of luck too. My job is 8 hours a day, not a minute more and there isn't work to be done outside of work hours; it's also very flexible so when DS has been poorly I've been able to either take the day off unpaid, or to work around his naps and bedtime etc at home as long as I get the hours done. DH works away a lot, so usually I'm doing it solo, and without such a flexible job I wouldn't be able to I don't think. We don't use a cleaner etc but he is in nursery 5 days a week, I did used to feel bad about that, but between us we get a lot of annual leave and weekends together are really cherished. I did consider cutting down my hours, but once he is at school going to switch to term time working so have used this time to save and progress.

@Reearry I work in a role alongside the forensics, yes. They're getting paid NZ $600-$1000 an hour. Take that in.

As others have said on here, I don't think the phrase 'having it all' is very helpful - too maximalist.

But, trying to think structurally: surely the cards are stacked against women progressing in their careers 'despite' children much more than is often admitted. The cost of childcare being the main elephant in the room, but there is also senior (male) management's instinctive prejudice against women with children. In my experience, they're seen as compromised; taken less seriously.

What I'm noticing in myself is that technically I'm 'having it all' - both my husband and I work full-time in relatively high-status and mostly interesting jobs, and the children are doing fine. But somehow I end up feeling more stressed and conflicted, and being more thinly spread, than he is all the same. And somehow he still gets more recognition than I do.

It looks to me like he gets to congratulate himself on doing anything at all in the household while it is taken as read that his job is very important to him. Whereas I'm just being a bog-standard woman if I do household/children stuff, and if I visibly care about my job despite having children I risk being seen as a bad mother or overambitious b**ch.

@Guineapigbridge @hadenoughbleach @Chocowally @Lazysundayafternoons

Thank you all for sharing your insight Just wanted to clarify my degree is bachelor's in commerce but I never worked in any sort of financial/ accounting role. I steered away and have had a decade of experience in learning and development now. Looking to move into career which offer high financial reward with flexibility. I don't have much idea about accounting in UK so looked it up ... What would be the best way to get into the field? Does starting with AAT professional qualification followed by either ACCA/ACA/ CIMA be the way to go? Which one would you recommend of three?

I wish there was a blog/ article clearly listing and mapping out careers with flexibility and pay

@Reearry

If you have an understanding of accounting/finance already, I'd skip AAT if I was you, as it's like a foundation course in accounting, but if you're capable, and can grasp financial concepts easily, it's an unnecessary extra step.

ACA is what I qualified as, however this usually has to be achieved under a training contract with one of the professional firms (EY, KPMG, PwC etc), and usually in either an audit or tax team. Pre-Covid, you'd spend a lot of time travelling to different client sites performing audits, though I'm not sure how they do that these days. Audit is great training for learning how businesses work financially, however I feel the early years of the professional training is more suited to recent graduates, or those who have less settled lives, due to the long hours and travelling around. Starting salary is usually about £25-30k, and by the time the 3 year training contract is up, you're qualifying on about £50-60k. Leaving practice after 7 years, 10 years ago, my first salary in industry was £80k.

CIMA is a management accounting qualification. Again, a personal view, it gives you a great understand of monthly costs, annual budgeting etc, less so financial modelling, controls and balance sheet. It's a fortunate management accountant who can progress to 6 figures plus without having solid control and ownership of the balance sheet. That said, you can study for CIMA part-time, in your own time.

At this stage, I'd go for ACCA if I was you. It's recognised across the world (ACA is a UK qualification, though there are overseas equivalents), you can do it part-time through distance learning, and it'll give you all round technical financial training. You'll learn about management accounting and financial accounting, as well as doing case studies as there are so many papers! You'd probably need 8-10 years of work experience with lots of progression to reach six figures, but it can be done. Good luck!

@hadenoughbleach thank you for taking the time to give a detailed response. It was very helpful and gave me a lot of clarity. I will look into ACA. Quick question around that, you've mentioned it's recognised worldwide, would it be easy to find jobs with the ACCA qualification outside of UK? Due to my partner's job, we do move between countries and I want to make sure the qualification will let me find work outside of the UK if required

@Reearry

I hope I haven't confused you, as you refer to both ACA and ACCA in your last post, however they are two different qualifications.

ACA - Associate Chartered Accountant; this qualification is issued and administered by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales, and must be completed alongside 3 years of work experience. If you look at the FTSE100 in the UK, the majority of CFO's and Group FD's will hold this charter. It used to be a bit of an old boys club, but that's changed in recent years. It's exclusive to the UK, however the ICAEW have affiliates all over the world, e.g. the equivalent in both the US and New Zealand is CA.

www.icaew.com

ACCA - Association of Chartered Certified Accountants; this is the same qualification worldwide, so it doesn't matter whether you take it in Newcastle or Nairobi, it'll be the same examination structure. This is why I mentioned that it's more universally known than the ACA. My understanding is that work experience is also required for the ACCA, however it has a less rigid structure than the ACA.

www.accaglobal.com/

Either route is a good way to increase your salary via retraining, though be prepared for some tough times in the early years, and particularly while studying!

ACCA should have been the start of a new paragraph; the first link is for ACA!

@hadenoughbleach thanks for clarification. It was a typo in my post. I meant ACCA on both accounts

Its possible but extremely hard.
Prior to having my 1st DC I was an administrator in a company and now 4 years later and another DC (and a change of job in between) I now run that company.

My husband is in the same role, but earns 45% more than what he did originally.

There has more tears than you can imagine, our family have had to help before and it takes a long time to get to a point where it all runs smoothly. But its doable.

My oldest DC starts nursery for half a day next week and we always said this was when things got easier. The nature of my job means I can do drop offs and pick ups but my husband finishes work at the same time as school finishing so chances are he'll do drop offs.

Were incredibly proud of each other and our family and the love we have for each other reflects it

My advice is have a plan, discuss with your partner when things are hard. Be kind, after a hard day its so easy to snap. Dont be afraid of the occasional take-away or not doing all the housework one day. Make sure you get time to yourself x

It looks to me like he gets to congratulate himself on doing anything at all in the household while it is taken as read that his job is very important to him. Whereas I'm just being a bog-standard woman if I do household/children stuff, and if I visibly care about my job despite having children I risk being seen as a bad mother or overambitious b**ch.

OMG this a million times over

@ThreeLocusts

[quote Reearry]@OublietteBravo thank you for your suggestion. I have a degree in accounting so unless I want to redo my undergraduate... It's not really an option[/quote]
Big 4 tax practitioner senior manager/director level - £100K plus and very flexible job.

aquicknamechange2019 thanks for the suggestion. Would you recommend ACCA as the next step as well?

@Reearry I did the Chartered Tax Advisor route, not ACCA. Might be worth calling one of the Big 4 recruitment teams and seeing what they suggest?

While I don't think you can have it all per se, I do think people can have very demanding careers that include far more than the average 8 hours x 5 days a week IF they have the means to outsource. Someone who can have a ft nanny who works 7am - 7pm who can do the morning routine, after school routine and ferrying as well as homework is in a far better situation than someone who has to do nursery drop offs, dash to collect from after school club and make tea each night. In addition a couple that can on top of that have a baby-sitter Saturday evenings and someone to help with garden, ironing, cleaning - depending on arrangement with nanny is also far far better off. If your time at home is spent with children and not the household management, that free time even if more hours spent at work, is far more free and so many demands are gone.

I have two Dr (Consultant) friends who do just that. Despite dc now all school age and in school full time, they still have nanny for not just before/after school but 2/3 full days respectively. Nanny does the weekly shop, any non-essential appts (dentist etc.), makes some meals, cleans, irons, is there when dc are too sick to go to school but not sick enough it has to be parents home. Also does date night once a week and organizes home maintenance. Once dc were all in school nanny's hours just changed 7-9 am and 3-7 pm two days a week then full time 3 days a week to do all the home stuff. Their Nannies quite love it by all accounts as they have the house to themselves, a job that will continue long term not just until dc at school and they can make extra money doing ad hoc baby-sitting the days they aren't needed full time.

Both are incredible Dr's (in roles typically reserved for men with stay at home wives) and wonderful parents, but every hour they aren't at work they have quality time with their dc compared to the rest of us who are cooking/cleaning/running errands etc. It works very well for them but they have the income to make it happen.