AIBU to retrain as an accountant at 28 after setbacks?

[Lunalara]

I have for the most part recovered from the horrible depression that I had, but I am still feeling a bit disappointed as to how little I have achieved, especially in adulthood. I used to play for the adult chess team as a child and achieved a distinction in my masters. Then I failed my PGCE and lost any remaining self esteem I had as the whole process was humiliating to me.

I have had a think about what I want to do. I would like to retrain as an accountant. I have an A in GCSE maths, but haven’t touched anything maths like since then. I have done some practice studying to get a feel for accountancy, and I do think I would enjoy it. The problem is I am 28 with not a whole lot to show for it.

Go for it. I took on a forensic accountant trainee at 28, she did her qualification then got married and had babies. She was an asset to the team whilst she was training as she was a bit more mature.

I also took on another female late starter who'd done several years in academia. She's one of my best employees. Again the maturity really helps.

I wanted to see evidence of interest in a financial career. In the first case she talked about the financial aspects of her previous career. In the second case she had done an initial qualification.

Definitely try for a training contract.

Would you be interested in industry or practice? Practice have more training contracts. Audit is a really good entry point. Practice has many good roles but you need to understand what the different bits of the business do.

28 is young. I'd continue to find out more about the places you want to work at and match your skills to what they do. Good luck.

To some extent this is true particularly for Kpmg who I work closely with - but it’s not the invoice processing automation people are describing here.
It’s the PowerPoint building, meeting prep, admin support that the consultancy side employ entry level staff to work on. Its consultancy related rather than an accountancy, although obviously someone like KPMG employed a very large number of accountants.

Hi OP. I don't know anything about accountancy but I just wanted to say that you are only 28 so with 40 years to go until state pension (or longer) you should go for it!

I changed careers at age 49 and don't regret it for a second. I kind of wish I had had the courage to do it earlier. Good luck!

I'd take some time to research the different types of accountancy role, and perhaps see if you can get some work experience (although I appreciate this may not be affordable). I think a lot of people think accountancy= working with numbers and pretty good pay but don't really understand what it might entail.
You mentioned that you found the PGCE exhausting and think you would be better with something less 'people facing' where you can just sit down and get on with it. Although you're not in front of people all day as with teaching, working in an accountancy firm is increasingly customer facing as more and more of the background work is done by computer programmes. In an audit role (the most common role in bigger firms) you are likely to spend a lot of time visiting clients right from the beginning. A role in a company in-house accounts team may be more suitable as that's likely to involve more data processing/analysis and you would spend most of your time working with your own team so less pressure to be 'performing' in front of customers etc.
The Chartered Accountant training is quite high pressure so if the pace and pressure of the PGCE was a problem for you, this might be an issue. In this route you'd be expected to work full time and also take professional exams for several years. Especially in the bigger firms it can be quite stressful, with an expectation that you will be working fairly long hours and keeping on top of studies. I have worked in a large firm with several people who tried to switch to accountancy from teaching in the belief that it would be less stressful and give them a better work life balance, but they all found it didn't give them the balance they were looking for.
Other routes to training, particularly if you are an in-house team, can be less stressful and offer more flexibility to train at a pace that suits you.

Possibly but it might be one of those jobs that could be vulnerable to AI in the coming years.

I do know two accountants that work for large firms and they absolutely hate it. Money is decent but very long hours, stress and misery.

I'm ACA qualified and enjoyed my career in tax (now retired) but I would not recommend it now as most junior jobs are being overtaken by software and AI. The senior level jobs, if you can find a suitable route to qualification, are all client facing so may not suit you as you said this not where you said your strengths lie.

Nobody is needed now for their number crunching and technical maths skills, its all about the soft skills, dealing with difficult people! Once I reached a fairly high level, I realised that I would have found my job easier if I had studied law rather than accountancy and, if I hadn't decided to retire, I was considering becoming a tax barrister.

As someone who did a PGCE and then accountancy/tax, please don't pay too much attention to those who are saying accountancy is client facing, so might not suit you. This is true, but it's totally different to teaching - the reason I struggled with teaching was that you literally get no break from the people facing aspect of it, plus you're dealing with 30 people at once almost all the time, many of whom don't want to be there and actively try to ignore you/disrupt you. This absolutely doesn't happen regularly in an accountancy firm! Yes you'll get difficult clients, but they're nothing like disruptive 15 year olds...

But if you don't like the client-facing aspect of accountancy, you can always go in-house.

I'm in-house and I still feel like I do a fair amount of number-crunching - or at least, I need to understand the figures. But I also like using my soft skills, dealing with people etc. I assume the OP does too, or she wouldn't even have considered teaching in the first place?

Hello. I am an accountant and really enjoy my job and am 20 years in working in industry as a cfo. Early days were doing basic accounts prep now I help run businesses.

28 is not too old. I had an apprentice in my team start at a similar age.

looks for entry roles and do it - what do you to lose? Except your Christmas holidays at year end but swings and roundabouts - enjoyable job with restrictions on when to take leave.

although I am a nice manager who will give the occasional monthend of to staff if we can cover

This was exactly it for me. I don’t mind dealing with the public, but not to the extent it was like for teaching. What you said nailed it in terms of how I felt during the PGCE. I don’t think I would have lasted long even if I had passed it. How is in-house accountancy like?

Hi Op,
I decided to retrain to be an accountant at 30. I have a degree in hospitality management and had worked in hotels from the age of 16. After being a revenue manager for a few years, I decided I much preferred numbers and spreadsheets to people 😂

So i self funded AAT levels 2 & 3 at my local college attending evenings. Half way through level 3 applied for an EO level job in the civil service.

I've stayed in the civil service since and they paid for Level 4, and then ACCA. I've been ACCA qualified for 5 years now.

AI/automation is reducing the number of jobs, but not to the point of them not existing. Someone will always need to be able to explain finance to non financiers and check and validate outputs from technology IMO. I progressed 4 grades in the civil service in 7 years, and I put that down to being willing to embrace technology and learning things like power automate which usually sit outside typical finance roles.

Happy to answer any questions.

There seems to be a misconception in general about accounting. People have this strange idea that there's either entry-level staff inputting invoices whose jobs are being lost to AI, or chartered accountants working in an accountancy practice, and nothing at all in between.

AI accounting software is utterly grim (particularly the cloud-based variety). I know. I've seen enough of it to know that it cannot possibly work properly without human intervention. I've project-managed the implementation of enough accounting software packages over the last 30+ years to know that the potential for fundamental configuration errors is huge. Particularly when it is being configured by non-accounting staff. I've had discussions with numerous software developers, programmers and the like who are great with computers but are not accountancy-trained, and don't realise the consequences of their actions. When you find an anomaly, half the time they don't even understand what you are talking about, or even why it might be an issue.

There will always be a need for accounting-trained people. The rise of the machines can only go so far, and I suspect it won't be long before people realise that AI will not be the solution to their problems, it will be the cause of them.

I'm doing tax in-house now - it's great! Pretty well paid and lots of autonomy, the hours are fine and I enjoy it. Lots of people-facing stuff, but mostly internal - eg dealing with the payroll/reward team, liaising with the payments team, the financial accountants etc. I also speak to HMRC fairly regularly and have professional advisors (big 4) who support with advice. I liked having clients when I was in practice, but it was also quite stressful. This isn't particularly stressful at all!

My Dad did this, I remember he qualified as an ACA with one of the big accountancy firms when I turned five. He had read PPE at university and was older than most people he qualified with. He then moved after he qualified and worked in various roles eventually becoming the CFO at a multinational company and then just before he retired he took on the role of chairman of a well known bank. He says it was a great stepping stone and he thoroughly enjoyed his career.

Good luck.

The AI product that made half our department redundant hasn't been launched or is even really public knowledge yet. As the other poster said, the process will have been ongoing for a while.

I think accounting in industry is a really interesting and varied career. It's not client facing and the deadlines are more predictable and less intense. You can work in Accounting, Tax, Treasury, Process and Transformation, Systems, FP&A, Inventory, Cost, with even more sub specialties in a big company. Learning about AI and data would also give you an edge. Or be a generalist in a smaller firm. You might also be able to find accounting adjacent roles - lots of roles like office manager or admin could have an element of managing some accounting work. I know of a dentist that became an accountant by getting involved in the practice admin work!
In my experience it's a flexible family friendly career.

You seem pretty bright so I think you would fly through AAT, get an entry level job in a big company and they will be more than happy to put you through accounting exams. We do it all the time. I just completed CIMA including certificate level in two years so if you push through it doesn’t have to take forever.

Good Luck!