Companies Will Teach You Finance. They Won't Teach You Accounting.

I had a call with a recruiter friend of mine this week, someone with about twenty years in the industry, and he said something that's stuck with me since. Years ago, a student asked him whether to major in finance or accounting. His answer came down to a distinction most students never think about: finance work moves with the economy, and accounting work doesn't.

The mechanism works like this. A financial analyst's job is largely forward looking, forecasting, planning, modeling what might happen next. That kind of work gets funded when a company has confidence in its outlook. When the outlook is uncertain, planning budgets tend to shrink first, because leadership would rather cut the cost of predicting the future than the cost of running the business today. Accounting doesn't carry that risk in the same way. Somebody has to close the books, file the taxes, and satisfy the audit requirements no matter what the economy is doing. That demand might slow at the margins, but it doesn't disappear the way planning budgets do.

He told me about someone who lived that mechanism firsthand. This person started his career in finance, spent a couple of years in it, then went back to school for a master's in accounting and pivoted into accounting work. Years later, he pivoted back into finance, the field he'd wanted from the start, and today he's earning north of $300,000. At some point in that conversation with my recruiter friend, he said something like: I wish I'd listened to you sooner and just started in accounting.

I've told my students a version of this before, though from my own angle. When I started my career, I didn't want to be an auditor. I wanted to do the kind of consulting work I do now. But I ask my students a question I still think about for myself at that age: what does a twenty-one-year-old actually know about how to run a small business well enough to advise someone on it? Not much, honestly, and you need the skillset first before you can offer that kind of advice to anyone. Audit gave me that. I didn't choose it because it was the goal. I chose it because it was the path to a goal I couldn't have earned my way into directly.

Here's where the recruiter's story connects to something I'm dealing with right now. I'm hiring for a senior associate role, and more than half of the resumes coming in belong to people with finance backgrounds trying to move into accounting work. I want to be precise here, that's happening at the senior level in my search, not entry level, so it isn't a one-to-one match with the story about someone just starting out. But the pattern underneath it is the same, and it tells you which direction the training actually flows.

When I'm evaluating candidates, I'd rather hire someone who already knows how to close a set of books and teach them the finance concepts they're missing than hire a strong analyst and try to teach them accounting from scratch. Accounting is technical and rules based in a way that takes real time to build. Finance concepts, once you understand how a business actually runs from the inside, come faster. That asymmetry is exactly why my recruiter friend's story rings true. When a company pulls back on analyst hiring, or gets more cautious about headcount in planning roles, the forecasting work doesn't vanish. It gets handed to the accountants already in the building, because those are the people the company can train quickly and trust with it.

My recruiter friend also confirmed something I wrote about a few weeks ago, that a lot of the Morgan Stanley names on resumes out of Baltimore were back-office roles rather than the kind of career-track experience the firm name implies. I've come to believe public accounting experience reads differently to people making hiring decisions, closer to career-driven experience than a support role with a well-known name attached to it.

If you're one of my students, most of you are already financial economics majors on top of your accounting coursework, so you have real optionality here. If you're not in accounting currently, you likely have the flexibility to shift a few classes around and get there before you graduate. That's worth doing, not because finance is the wrong choice, but because accounting gives you a base that finance alone doesn't.

I want to be honest about the broader market too, since none of this happens in a vacuum. The entry-level job market right now is difficult across the board. Offshoring and AI are putting pressure on both accounting and finance work, and neither field is immune. The hardest stretch tends to be the distance between your first job and reaching a senior level, where the work becomes harder to offshore or automate and you become more valuable to keep than to cut. That's true right now, and it's also subject to change as the market shifts, so don't treat it as permanent.

Getting an accounting degree gives you more options for your career progression, especially starting out and in today's economy. Starting out is the hardest part, and those options can be worth a great deal in the short term and the long term, whether you stay in accounting or eventually use it to get where you actually wanted to go.

For more on how to evaluate a role beyond the name attached to it, including that Morgan Stanley back-office example, I wrote about it in The Logo on the Building Is Not the Job Description. And if you're weighing whether to stay in public accounting or move into industry, Reasons to Stay in Public Accounting Instead of Choosing Industry gets into that decision in more detail.