I got an email recently from another blogger, Hunter Richards, who manages the site at http://www.softwareadvice.com/accounting/. He recently published a study on accounting-related technical skills sought by employers. I got my start as an accountant, so I found this study very interesting. I started out my technical career doing international consolidations in spreadsheets. At the time, I was using Supercalc 5 on a Unix workstation with a 640K DOS partition and 2 diskette drives. The consolidation macros I wrote prompted me to change diskettes twice for the Balance Sheet and twice for the Income Statement. Later, I was involved in both an Oracle Financials project and an SAP project at the same company. I also got really good at Excel and ended up writing Excel books.
Technology certainly made it possible to get me from my accounting background to where I am today. That being said, the time I spent in accounting was also extremely important as it gave me domain experience in a given field and I use that experience nearly every day. Lesson from it all? If you an accountant and you learn a technology, you end up an Oracle ACE Director and blog on your experiences? Well, you never know!
Here is a link to the blog entry. Enjoy!
http://www.softwareadvice.com/articles/accounting/which-tech-skills-help-accountants-land-jobs/
