@DancingDog
Hi I own a small firm of chartered accountants in a northern town with 15 staff. I’ve just employed two trainees starting salary is £19k rising to £30k on qualification. My two managers, with 10+ years experience earn £38k and I earn £60k as the owner. You can’t do an online course to be a qualified accountant as you need 3 years practical experience, there are 15 exams which you study for whilst working full-time. You get paid time off to study but there is still a lot of work to do at home (I’d say at least 12 hours a week outside the job).
Have you looked on nhs jobs? DH works in finance in NHS and is a senior manager (8b) they start as a band 5 and you can progress fairly quickly.
I have a few clients that employ developers, starting salary is about £23k rising to £55k after 8-10 years, they have a couple of apprentices but most of the staff are taught in house and don’t do any external training.
If I’m being honest depending on where you are £38k is a good salary and is not an entry level salary in any industry. I have clients that own their own business (care agency, children’s nursery, play centre, physio centre) all of whom earn more than £40k but it is stressful and can be long hours. I’d imagine you could transfer your skills and earn more than retraining. One of my care agencies started 18 months ago, the director earned £80k in the first year and has 24 members of staff now but to earn more you need to scale. The councils are desperate for care providers, his problem is finding qualified nurses to supervise for CQC / to remain VAT exempt but as a nurse you wouldn’t have that issue.
There are many routes into accountancy, but realistically, whilst there are some routes of becoming paper qualified without working at an accountancy firm, no one will want to employ you when you qualify if you go down that route. The issue is, you're expected to become 'street smart' as you become 'book smart' and no one would know what to do with you if you were only 'book smart' by the end of the three years. Plus, you'd still need to get some practical experience to become fully qualified, as opposed to just exam qualified.
Normal route is to 'earn and learn', i.e. to be employed on a training contract whilst your practical experience increases as your exam experience does.
Starting salaries are around £20k in the cheapest parts of the country, more like £27k in London. This can rise quite a lot on qualification and with experience, but it's worth pointing out that to make megabucks, you need to take on managerial responsibilities and sell, sell, sell. It's worth thinking about why you haven't progressed in the NHS and what you do and don't want to do in a new job before you look at accountancy as the magic cure.
Some accountants don't want to lead a team or sell anything, and if that's you, you're not going to earn any more than you do now, and you're going to face a sudden drop in income as you retrain. Would that be worth it? Probably not. Accountancy, despite not being useful like working in the NHS, can be incredibly high stress.
If you are ambitious and have a good work ethic, and you're prepared to learn, your age will not hold you back. Accountancy is really forgiving of career changers who want to be there, and the earning potential can be high. Say, up to £70k for a manager, around £90k for a director and any three to four figure sum for a partner/business owner.
Location is also important. The upper levels I've indicated are London-weighted and are at big firms. It's not so much the cost of living, it's that more complicated clients gravitate to well known names in London for comfort.
I don't think it's an issue you haven't done any complex math since high school if you're decent with computers (if you're talking about retraining in tech, you must have some IT skills already) as long as you're willing to learn, work hard and are good with people. People skills are more important in accountancy than many think.