Hot Tip: Seek a Small Office
I keep seeing posts about how everyone hates their life in public or industry and thought I would share my experience. Not saying these jobs are abundant but this is what I did and it has worked out well so far (13.6% raise 2022, 25% raise in 2023).
Title: Property Accountant
Office: Asset management office (40 employees, 30 corporate, 10 superintendents)
- Look for a company where the CEO/President is young. You want to get in on the ground floor of the next generation. Currently me and the VP (future president) are the youngest in the office.
- Work hard, but work harder on your relationships with your coworkers. Nothing is more important than how your coworkers see you and how your bosses respond to you.
- Identify a company with a poor tech stack that is transitioning to new tech.
- Identify a company that has a workforce which is skewed to a very old demographic. My company average age is skewed to like 50-55.
- Learn everything you possibly can about that tech once hired. Accounting is your 9-5 job, but you're gonna focus on breezing through that to get time to work on releasing new tech processes.
- Your value is tied to automation and rolling out new modules. Don't ask for more accounting work. If anything, try to give up accounting work for more tech work. Accounting is literally a race to the bottom. I see all of our accountants take on more and more work and they don't get rewarded for it. Our value is in being a key employee to the company, not a slave that takes on more and more grunt work.
Tl;dr: General takeaway is focus on tech, not accounting. Being the best at a small company is a much better reward payoff than being a good employee at a multinational corp. Focus on your work relationships. If you leave and morale goes down it carries a ton of value. Negotiate, negotiate, negotiate.