Career Mistakes to Avoid

In this article, I’m going to talk about mistakes I see people making in their career. This is assuming you have big goals and want to move up the corporate ladder and/or work in great companies that pay you well based on your skill set. I realize that not everyone cares about these things, and there are those who simply want to go to work and make enough to pay their bills. But if you want to make the most of your career path and open up more opportunities, please review these mistakes and take them into consideration. This is going to be geared towards an accounting career, but the information could be applied to many industries.

1. Job hopping

Companies want to see that you’re dedicated enough to stay with a company more than 1-3 years. It’s okay to have a few job hopping situations. I think most people understand that sometimes you get into a job that just doesn’t align with you and it’s best to move on. However if you have a 10-20 year job history of working for multiple companies for only a year or two, you’ll be more likely to be skipped over for job opportunities. I review resumes for companies regularly, and one of the first things I look at is how long the candidate stayed at jobs. Staying at most jobs for at least 3-4 years shows me that the person felt a sense of responsibility and dedication to those employers. In the long-term I do think it’s a good idea to move around a little bit in your career for growth, which I’ll talk about below. If you do have several short job situations that weren’t your fault (company closing, jobs that were meant to be temporary, etc), it’s a good idea to make a note on the resume itself. Also consider completely taking out really short jobs if they aren’t needed on your resume, and move to a date format that only states the years worked (such as 2012 – 2014) without including months (such as Dec 2012 – Jan 2014).

2. No variety in experience

It’s good to get a variety of skills and work in a variety of industries in accounting. This will help you gain more skills and get exposure to different ways of doing things. Working as a staff accountant at a CPA firm is a great way to accomplish this without moving around from job to job multiples times. Or simply working at a few different small companies that allow you to take on several roles can accomplish this as well. If you want to grow in your career, the worst thing to do is stay in the same job for 20+ years doing the same thing. For example, spending 20 years doing accounts payable (paying bills) is probably not going to help your skills grow all that much. Now this may not resonate with everyone. I personally would be bored out of my mind working in the same company or working in the same specialized industry my entire career, but some people appreciate the monotony and stability. I spent many years early in my career teaching accounting at a community college. While I liked the job and liked teaching, I also didn’t want my entire career to be teaching. My skills were becoming very stagnant and I wasn’t learning anything new. Teaching accounting is a lot different than doing accounting. If wanted to shift my career and open more opportunities, I had to do something different. It can be tough to make big shifts in the middle of your career, but it can be done with persistence and flexibility.

3. Not getting formal education

I see so much negativity on the internet about having a college degree, and how you don’t need it to get a job or make a lot of money. While this is true, having a college degree or some formal higher education will open more opportunities. It’s not necessarily about having more money, but about having more options. It also can give you a really good foundation of knowledge by taking formal classes that involve studying and taking tests. I definitely learned a lot about accounting in college because I was forced to study and take tests to “pass”. I don’t know that I would have been able to learn as much as I did by grabbing an accounting textbook and teaching myself, even though I’m very much a self-starter and self-taught in many areas of my life. Also by learning at a college, I knew that I learned proper accounting without worrying about learning it incorrectly. I learned so much more by having hands on experience after college, but having a baseline of knowledge gave me a good foundation from which to build upon. I want to note that I appreciated taking non-accounting courses also because it gave me a more diverse knowledge base. I took classes on marketing, human resources, business management, etc. Now I don’t think you necessarily have to get a bachelor’s degree, but even one or two introductory classes or a certificate consisting of 5-6 classes would be extremely helpful. There are also a lot of non-college courses on the internet that could potentially work as an alternative. However I’m always going to prefer a formal college class at an accredited college.

4. Not being willing to work on building skills

If you want to grow in your career and open more opportunities, it’s important to learn new skills. A good way to learn new things is to take on more responsibilities at your current job. Now I know what you’re thinking and hear me out. You may not see the financial results immediately, but in the long-term taking opportunities to accept responsibilities outside of your normal duties can be a great skill builder. You would need to remove the attitude of showing up with your head down and doing your work, and instead look around for opportunities to be hands on in making the company better overall while improving your own skills in the process. I’ll give you an example of this. Early in my own bookkeeping company, I worked part-time for another bookkeeping company for a few years while building up my client base. The employee who had been in charge of 1099s left the company. Now I didn’t have any experience with preparing 1099s at this point. I saw the opportunity to learn 1099s in someone else’s company where I was getting training for tasks. I offered to help with this function and they gladly handed the responsibility to me. They gave me some guidance and between their guidance/training and my own general knowledge, I was able to learn this function. Now I’m going to be honest and say that it was a complete nightmare that year. The person hired to assist me didn’t work out, and I was left to handle 1099s myself (with some assistance from a few other employees). However I gained some very valuable skills in the process and was able to confidently offer 1099s services to my own clients after that. Now I could have learned 1099s on my own in my own company, but I felt better learning it under someone else’s company.

I want to mention that not all companies will have opportunities to learn other skills. I worked in a small local law office, and tried to assist and fill in for the other employees to gain more skills and knowledge. In that company it didn’t go over very well since those other employees weren’t in a growth mindset and it was annoying to them. The company wasn’t the right fit for me long-term partly due to that. If growth is important to you, then I suggest trying to get clues about these issues in your interviews. It may not be a good idea to outright ask though. You could ask questions about whether any cross training ever happens.