Building a Professional Career in Accounting

Building a Professional Career in Accounting

An Accounting degree is a fast track to beginning your professional career in accounting. An accounting career can take you in many different directions- private practice, industry, tech, pharma, services, digital business. A career in accounting can also be a springboard to a much broader business career. Many qualified accountants use accounting as a professional foundation from which you can pursue a more general business career that could go in many directions. If you aspire to become a professional accountant, as well as learning alot of discipline specific knowledge and technical skills, you will also develop critical thinking skills, enhance your numerical ability and learn how to analyse business issues and solve problems from a financial perspective.

Our accounting graduates work in a broad range of industries, including large, well-known accounting and professional services firms, large multinationals, SMEs and start-ups. Accounting is a profession that is in demand across multiple industries and sectors. If you’re considering a career as an accountant, and contemplating pursuing a degree in the field, this article will help you to understand the pathway to qualification and how our degree options fit into that pathway.

To become a professional accountant you must complete a training contract with a professional accounting body such as Chartered Accounting Ireland (CAI), the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) or the Institute of Certified Public Accountants (CPA). One of the huge benefits of an undergraduate or postgraduate accounting degree in DCU is that you can gain valuable exemptions from these training paths meaning you will need to undertake less exams and significantly shorten your route to becoming fully qualified.

As you progress through your undergraduate studies you will start to figure out what type of accounting career might suit you and which professional route you might wish to pursue. CAI is often undertaken by people who would like to pursue an audit or tax career in practice. Qualification with CAI involves completing three sets of exams- Cap 1, Cap 2 and FAE. ACCA or CIMA would often be pursued by students who wish to train in industry as opposed to practice. ACCA consists of 14 separate papers, while CIMA have suites of exams organised in three levels- operational, management and strategic. CPA, another route more commonly pursued by students wishing to train in industry, have 4 stages of exams with 15 papers in total. As well as taking these exams, most professional routes require at least three years relevant training in practice or industry before you become fully qualified.

DCU Accounting courses

DCU Business School offers a number of courses in Accounting and has a long history of teaching Accounting. Many DCU Accountancy alumni hold prominent positions in accountancy practices and in industry-based accounting and finance roles. Let’s start with our undergraduate degree, the BA Accounting and Finance. This is a three year degree course specialising in both accounting and finance. The course also offers a large variety of broader business modules including economics, entrepreneurship and critical thinking, and if you wish, you can study a language as part of your course. Students frequently undertake a summer internship in accounting, taxation or finance and many of our graduates will go on to pursue our Masters in Accounting .The Masters in Accounting is a specialist Masters requiring an undergraduate degree in Accounting or a Business degree with a significant specialism in Accounting. This course is a great way to gain additional exemptions from accountancy bodies and of course gain advanced knowledge in the field of accounting, business, data analytics and society.

MSc International Accounting and Business is a great new option for students who are converting to accounting from a non-business undergraduate degree. This course combines both business and accounting and is a great way to start your accounting career when you don’t have a business degree. You’ll also undertake our Next Generation Management programme as part of this course.

Each of these course pages lists the exemptions you can gain from professional accounting bodies.

Finally, many graduates of broader Business degrees such as our Bachelor of Business Studies will go on to train in accounting and are also very attractive to graduate employers in accounting.

We hope this article will help you to understand the variety of options available to you in terms of training to be a professional accountant, and of course how a DCU degree or masters degree might fit in with your career path. If you have any questions please email business.dcu@dcu.ie