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At a glance
When he was just 27 years old, Jason Azzopardi FCPA, CEO at non-bank lender Brighten, was already being offered potential partnerships in public practices. He had started in practice when he was just 18, attending university in the evenings and working with a cross-section of clients from various industries.
“I had some great mentors who developed my technical abilities, which formed the bedrock of my career,” Azzopardi says. “But I really wanted to travel, and I wasn’t certain if public practice was for me.”
Instead of accepting a lucrative partnership position and assumed career success, he flew to London and sought out professional growth.
“At the time I didn’t fully comprehend the pivot I was making,” he says. “However, I had my practice experience to fall back on.”
There are a lot of young accountants in large accounting firms who risk becoming institutionalised, Azzopardi believes.
“Unless you’re clear that you want to be a partner in one of those firms, you shouldn’t stay longer than five to seven years, in my opinion. Once you’re in them for too long, it becomes increasingly difficult to pivot to an industry role.”
Dr Ruchi Sinha, organisational psychologist and associate professor at Singapore’s Nanyang Business School, says it is not at all uncommon for accountants to begin questioning their career options once they have reached a certain level of proficiency.
“Career transition interest and choice typically happens seven to 15 years after starting your working career,” she says. “By that stage, you have enough expertise to critically assess your future pathway.”
Here are four steps to help manage a potential career transition.
1. Look inward first
Sinha, whose advice is backed by academic research, says any career pivot should begin with self-reflection.
This is about understanding your sense of self and how much of it comes from your current career identity.
The process could involve asking questions such as: Am I defined by technical expertise? Do I possess deeper skills such as pattern recognition, problem-solving or stakeholder management? How much of my sense of self is wrapped up in what I do?
2. Consider your existing skills contextually
Existing skills are very narrowly defined, particularly in roles within a large organisation. When you are a small cog in a large machine, it is not unusual to feel as if your skills are not transferable.
“It is only when you do the identity work and figure out what you’re good at, what you enjoy doing and what you have built expertise in, in terms of behavioural skills and knowledge, that you start cognitively reframing and seeing how these things are transferable,” Sinha says.
It is then, she continues, that your skills can be considered on a contextual level rather than an industry one.
“If you have, for example, pattern recognition skills or deductive reasoning, it doesn’t matter whether the patterns are related to real estate, medical data, stakeholder management or anything else. They apply to any profession.”
3. Try things outside of your core role
Self-reflection on its own can be misleading, Sinha says. As a mental process, it has blind spots, so it is important to do what she calls “micro experiments”. This might involve volunteering for projects outside of your core role or exploring secondments, and it helps to create a new image of yourself.
This is all a part of “job crafting”, she explains.
“It is a way to help test assumptions in safe, low risk ways,” Sinha says. “This helps you to get clarity around what you’re good at, what you like doing and what is valuable to other people.”
For Azzopardi, this step involved travelling and exploring new career directions. He did not feel this was a high-risk move, as he knew he could step back into the same role if he failed to find work in the UK.
“I didn’t want to go down a partnership avenue until I had seen both sides,” he says. “I didn’t feel I had enough information to dedicate myself to that without experiencing the industry first.”
Along the way, he discovered new stories and perspectives from people outside his previous field.
4. Seek different input
While Azzopardi says his public practice mentors were excellent, they also had a vested interest in keeping talented people in the business.
“They’re trying to sell you a dream to retain you,” he says. “But I’d never travelled outside Australia, and I wanted to experience something different before I settled down.”
This is good practice, Sinha believes. When considering a new path forward, collecting other people’s stories is an important part of the process. They might come from somebody who works in another department or on the other side of the world.
“You can self-discover by seeking out these stories through mentor relationships, or through online content, formal coaching or from working somewhere else,” she says. “Some of it is planned and some of it is happenstance.”
Either way, it is important to discover and experience it yourself.
“Before you critique a profession, know whether you are critiquing it from lived experience or from stories others have told you,” Sinha says.
Advice for early career accountants
Azzopardi says strategic planning, to whatever extent possible, is a good start when building a career.
Consider where you would like to be five years from now and begin seeking opportunities that will help you move in that direction, he advises. Additionally, expect setbacks and use them as powerful learning experiences.
“Have a good think, too, about what industry you want to be in,” Azzopardi says. “Keep building knowledge, don’t be afraid to move sideways rather than upwards, and remember that it is much harder to jump to a new industry when you are more senior.
“Now is your chance.”
