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Old 10-23-2013, 07:54 PM
 
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Originally Posted by jman07 View Post
I would go back and get a minor in CS. Have you ever done programming though. Its worse than accounting for sure. Mind numbingly boring and hard.
I haven't. But I am trying to learn Python right now to see if it would be a good fit. And I didn't really have problems with accounting because it was boring; I had problems with audit mostly because I hate writing and I hate having to deal with ambiguity/decision-making.
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Old 10-23-2013, 08:06 PM
 
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Originally Posted by LOL_Whut View Post
But get your next degree part time while working full time. You want to build continuous work experience on your resume.
Ideally I would do this; however, I would be concerned about having to potentially do this in an online program. It would be great if it was an online program through a well-recognized and accredited school. I worry about how a potential employer might view a program like University of Maryland University College (which would be an online program that doesn't allow people to take classes in person in a classroom) or Oregon State University (which is not accredited). I don't think there would be any options that would be cheaper and as renowned as going to an in-state school for a post-bacc, but I would have to take classes during the day to do that. I don't think there are any online programs for a post-bacc in computer science that are associated with any of the public universities in Virginia. This would make full-time employment hard.

Also, I may not be able to get a full-time job in accounting anyways. I am struggling to find one.
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Old 10-24-2013, 07:51 AM
 
Location: Hampton Roads
3,032 posts, read 4,724,690 times
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Originally Posted by UMW_grad View Post
Ideally I would do this; however, I would be concerned about having to potentially do this in an online program. It would be great if it was an online program through a well-recognized and accredited school. I worry about how a potential employer might view a program like University of Maryland University College (which would be an online program that doesn't allow people to take classes in person in a classroom) or Oregon State University (which is not accredited). I don't think there would be any options that would be cheaper and as renowned as going to an in-state school for a post-bacc, but I would have to take classes during the day to do that. I don't think there are any online programs for a post-bacc in computer science that are associated with any of the public universities in Virginia. This would make full-time employment hard.

Also, I may not be able to get a full-time job in accounting anyways. I am struggling to find one.
My friend is getting a master's degree online in IT via Virginia Tech. He does classwork online and takes tests at their testing centers on weekends.

I am a business systems analyst, work with programming languages a lot (SQL, crystal programming, C++). Let me tell you. There is a lot of ambiguous decision-making.
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Old 10-24-2013, 10:21 AM
 
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Originally Posted by randomlikeme View Post
My friend is getting a master's degree online in IT via Virginia Tech. He does classwork online and takes tests at their testing centers on weekends.

I am a business systems analyst, work with programming languages a lot (SQL, crystal programming, C++). Let me tell you. There is a lot of ambiguous decision-making.
I had looked into the Master of IT program at Virginia Tech. I am not sure if a Master's in IT is the way to go for me (as it is very different from a computer science degree).

I think I can make decisions with ambiguous data. But I hated audit because there were often no clear instructions about how to do assignments, but then your boss could get upset with you for going outside of the scope of the assignment (which isn't clearly defined) or not viewing the directions in the same way that the boss did. I think I would feel more comfortable working as a computer scientist because it seems like it would only matter if, using your time wisely, you build something that works efficiently.

But I could be wrong in my view of the ambiguity in computer science professions.
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Old 10-24-2013, 10:46 AM
 
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Originally Posted by UMW_grad View Post
I wonder if anyone (especially those with HR experience) could give me any input on my situation.

I received a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration and Mathematics in May 2011. The business administration degree included several accounting courses. I also received a Master of Accounting degree in May 2012. After graduation, I worked as an auditor at a government agency for 10 months but resigned in May 2013 because of performance issues.

Although I think I would not mind being an accountant/budget analyst/financial analyst in a private company, I am finding it very difficult to many jobs in these areas because I don't have any relevant accounting experience. Most of the position postings that I have seen require 1-2 years of experience in corporate accounting or strong internships in corporate accounting. My experience as an auditor is not relevant at all because it was all related to contract audits.

Knowing myself, I absolutely would hate to try to become an auditor or tax accountant based on my knowledge of what these jobs entail. Also, I think I would have a difficult time trying to get an auditing position because I was basically fired from this type of position.

Thus, I am thinking of quitting accounting entirely. I have thought about going back to school to get a post-bacc (30 or so credits) in computer science from a state university. I like the idea of being a computer scientist because there are ways that I can gain relevant experience without having an employer (i.e., open source projects and volunteering services).

However, I am scared of doing this. I think a prospective employer might be concerned about why I would get a Master of Accounting degree and then switch fields so quickly. An employer might think I did not do my research in deciding on an accounting career, so I might not put enough research into determining whether a computer science career would be a good fit for me.

I really don't want to hide the Master of Accounting degree because I was a full-time student, and so I would have a one-year gap of employment on my resume. Also, I held a job at the university from which I would get a really good reference.

Would getting a post-bacc in computer science be a complete waste of my time based on how employers might view my decision to change career fields?
I think it's a waste of your time. Because you are young (I'm assuming you are early 20s) what I'll say will go in one ear and out the other. Believe me, I've been there before as well.

I don't think it's the specific field of work that's at issue here. I think it's WORK, period. As many young folks are wont to do, they enter the workforce with idealized notions of what it will be like, and then realize that for 95% of people, working for a living sucks. You feel like you are constantly underpaid for what you have to do. You deal with unpleasant co-workers and bosses, and the dreaded office politics. And to top it off the work you are doing feels boring and meaningless.

You will confront this in most professions, and until you understand this you will end up just jumping from career to career and then wake up one day and you are 35 years old. You may get your CS degree and then dislike it. What's next after that? Law School? Business School? Med School?

I think it's problematic that you resigned from a government agency for performance reasons. You mind providing more details on the circumstances? Gov't work generally is more pleasant and less stressful than private sector. If you were having performance issues there, I'd be concerned about factors that are affecting your work performance.

I also doubt you are truly passionate about CS. You stated you have no programming experience and just started dabbling with Python.
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Old 10-24-2013, 11:44 AM
 
Location: Hampton Roads
3,032 posts, read 4,724,690 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by UMW_grad View Post
I had looked into the Master of IT program at Virginia Tech. I am not sure if a Master's in IT is the way to go for me (as it is very different from a computer science degree).

I think I can make decisions with ambiguous data. But I hated audit because there were often no clear instructions about how to do assignments, but then your boss could get upset with you for going outside of the scope of the assignment (which isn't clearly defined) or not viewing the directions in the same way that the boss did. I think I would feel more comfortable working as a computer scientist because it seems like it would only matter if, using your time wisely, you build something that works efficiently.

But I could be wrong in my view of the ambiguity in computer science professions.
While I don't have a degree in computer science, but rather I have a job that is very programming-oriented (previous finance major, background in coding languages out of a desire to learn), I would say most of the scopes of what I do isn't clearly defined. I can often receive data requests from a CFO where all he says is "I need a report doing this." and I will have to figure out how I can program what I think he is asking of me. I have no clear instructions, nor am I even told what tools this person would prefer (a report coded in SQL, one coded in crystal, one coded in another SAP application). I am essentially on my own to figure it out. Often times, I have misunderstood what someone was asking for and had to recode entire projects. This isn't like school where each assignment has certain criteria and then you receive a grade. Often, it is ambiguous where you have to search out what people really mean.

You seem new in your career: my advice is to ask questions if you feel directions are ambiguous. Often, I will have to call people to doublecheck if I understand what they mean. Be the squeaky wheel when you don't understand something.

I also think you might have jumped the gun on quitting without working on a performance improvement plan with your manager and giving yourself time to improve.
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Old 10-24-2013, 01:07 PM
 
42 posts, read 80,057 times
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Originally Posted by countofmc View Post
I think it's a waste of your time. Because you are young (I'm assuming you are early 20s) what I'll say will go in one ear and out the other. Believe me, I've been there before as well.

I don't think it's the specific field of work that's at issue here. I think it's WORK, period. As many young folks are wont to do, they enter the workforce with idealized notions of what it will be like, and then realize that for 95% of people, working for a living sucks. You feel like you are constantly underpaid for what you have to do. You deal with unpleasant co-workers and bosses, and the dreaded office politics. And to top it off the work you are doing feels boring and meaningless.

You will confront this in most professions, and until you understand this you will end up just jumping from career to career and then wake up one day and you are 35 years old. You may get your CS degree and then dislike it. What's next after that? Law School? Business School? Med School?

I think it's problematic that you resigned from a government agency for performance reasons. You mind providing more details on the circumstances? Gov't work generally is more pleasant and less stressful than private sector. If you were having performance issues there, I'd be concerned about factors that are affecting your work performance.

I also doubt you are truly passionate about CS. You stated you have no programming experience and just started dabbling with Python.
Regarding getting a computer science degree--I do have some other programming experience. I took Comp Sci 101 in college which exposed me to programming in a made-up language, and I enjoyed the course. I also took a pass-fail course in Java (didn't have enough time to devote to take it graded). I also programmed in MATLAB for my math thesis. I did enjoy these programming activities.

However, I want to learn more about programming before I make any decision to become a computer scientist. I would ideally get more programming experience under my belt to determine whether the career path would be a good one for me. I might try to take a programming course at a community college if I could find one nearby that offers the course at night. I wouldn't want to spend money on a post-bacc just to enter a new career and find out that I hate it. If I didn't think I was passionate about computer science, then I would not get the degree.

The reason I would even consider computer science at all is that it seems it will be very difficult to get another accounting position without experience. I don't think I will have opportunities to join a public accounting firm in an entry-level capacity because I almost got fired from my audit job, because I'm not in college anymore and most public accounting firms recruit employees from there, and because these positions are recruited 8-10 months in advance. It seems difficult to get a corporate accounting job because I lack experience. And I don't think I would be able to get a position like accounts payable specialist because I would be overqualified in terms of my education but under-qualified in terms of experience.

Computer science would give me another chance to get a job. I don't think I am likely to find one in accounting.

I resigned from the government position before the end of my one-year probationary period. I think I had so many issues in the position for a lot of reasons:

1) I lacked any practical accounting experience before taking the position. Most people in my office (including my supervisor) entered the agency having done audit work or corporate accounting work before. As a result, I did not know a lot of facts about how accounting processes work, despite the fact that I was mainly auditing the design of accounting systems. I didn't even know what questions to ask to get help in many cases. I think a lot of my coworkers assumed I knew things that I didn't. I did make some mistakes on my audits as a result of this lack of knowledge, but I don't think my supervisor was sympathetic because she thought that they were careless mistakes made because I wasn't listening carefully during interviews.

2) I was working with a new supervisor who was inexperienced and way overworked. We were supposed to have six supervisors in the office, but there were only four, and these positions could not be filled because of sequestration. As a result, my supervisor got stuck managing 6-7 employees while most supervisors in the agency typically only have 4 people to supervise. As a result, a lot of my work did not get reviewed until close to the end of my probation period, and my supervisor was not happy with it. I did not receive much feedback regarding my performance so that I could make adjustments until it was too late.

3) I made a huge mistake on one of my audits. I had received guidance from a more experienced coworker who told me to proceed the way that I did, and I did not have enough knowledge about the subject matter to recognize that I should have questioned my coworker's approach. Furthermore, after I was made aware of my mistake, my coworker took over my part of the project. I did not make any attempts to correct the mistake because I was not aware of the fact that the deadline of the audit kept being pushed back. Thus, I thought that there was not enough time to get a correction. (If this seems weird. . . we were dealing with employees who often worked in Afghanistan, so they often did not respond for months to e-mails we sent to request information.) I thought my coworker would be responsible for getting the correction. She did not do this, despite the fact that she rewrote some of my working papers related to the mistake. Although I tried to explain this situation to my supervisor, my supervisor was not happy with my explanation. In her opinion, I completely disregarded instructions that were provided to me. My supervisor expressed to me that she was very upset about this uncorrected mistake because it could have gotten her in a lot of trouble with the contractor, and it reflected badly on her when the audit was reviewed by many members of management.


4) My supervisor thought I wrote poorly on about 25% of the work I turned in. However, I did not receive much feedback about this issue until close to the end of my probationary period. I think I could have corrected the issue if given time.

5) I received conflicting guidance about a lot of issues from different coworkers because the work was pretty ambiguous. As a result, I sometimes asked the same question of more than one person (or also asked my supervisor) to obtain more than one opinion. There were several times when I received guidance from my coworkers that my supervisor did not agree with, and this is probably due to the ambiguity of the work. My supervisor perceived my behavior as me not trusting other team members, so she did not think I could work on a team.

6) I definitely had trouble with receiving negative feedback, especially feedback that was worded very harshly or was inaccurate. I didn't really know how to defend myself against inaccurate feedback in a way that would not be perceived as defensive or rude. I was very defensive when I received harshly worded or rude criticisms. I think I am good at receiving negative feedback if someone is tactful about it. This is definitely an area I need to work on.

7) I made the mistake of taking a lunch break that was too long because I was really upset one day. I'd spent the whole break crying. I should have asked my supervisor to let me take a longish break before I left the office. In my opinion, I think my supervisor over-reacted to this issue (I was not working in a client-serving capacity and no one needed my help at the office at the time, and I stayed late to finish my work). She said my action showed a lack of common sense. However, I did learn a valuable lesson not to break any rules that I think aren't important because someone else might have a different opinion.

8) I think I may have trouble getting along with supervisors, as I did not seem to be able to get along with this one. I have had seven supervisors but only managed to get along very well with five of them. Although it is true that these two supervisors had difficult personalities, that still doesn't give me an excuse not to get along with them.

9) I also may have issues with coping with job assignments that are very ambiguous. I need to work on being more decisive.
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Old 10-24-2013, 01:33 PM
 
42 posts, read 80,057 times
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Originally Posted by randomlikeme View Post
While I don't have a degree in computer science, but rather I have a job that is very programming-oriented (previous finance major, background in coding languages out of a desire to learn), I would say most of the scopes of what I do isn't clearly defined. I can often receive data requests from a CFO where all he says is "I need a report doing this." and I will have to figure out how I can program what I think he is asking of me. I have no clear instructions, nor am I even told what tools this person would prefer (a report coded in SQL, one coded in crystal, one coded in another SAP application). I am essentially on my own to figure it out. Often times, I have misunderstood what someone was asking for and had to recode entire projects. This isn't like school where each assignment has certain criteria and then you receive a grade. Often, it is ambiguous where you have to search out what people really mean.

You seem new in your career: my advice is to ask questions if you feel directions are ambiguous. Often, I will have to call people to doublecheck if I understand what they mean. Be the squeaky wheel when you don't understand something.

I also think you might have jumped the gun on quitting without working on a performance improvement plan with your manager and giving yourself time to improve.
Thanks for your insight. If I may ask, how do you go about asking for clarification without making it seem like you are incompetent? My boyfriend works in a similar type of position (economic analysis which required use of SAS, Stata, R, and other languages). He tells me that you could run the risk of coming across as incompetent if you ask too many questions, so you just have to do your best to make judgments about what type of data/stats your clients would need.

I think I sometimes asked too many questions on my last job and it made me seem like I was incompetent.

I am pretty certain I would have been fired from my position had I stayed. The agency I worked at was not flexible about probation periods. My supervisor told me that she was not going to recommend me for continued employment, and there was no way by which the agency could extend my probation period.
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Old 10-24-2013, 02:08 PM
 
Location: Hampton Roads
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Originally Posted by UMW_grad View Post
Thanks for your insight. If I may ask, how do you go about asking for clarification without making it seem like you are incompetent? My boyfriend works in a similar type of position (economic analysis which required use of SAS, Stata, R, and other languages). He tells me that you could run the risk of coming across as incompetent if you ask too many questions, so you just have to do your best to make judgments about what type of data/stats your clients would need.

I think I sometimes asked too many questions on my last job and it made me seem like I was incompetent.

I am pretty certain I would have been fired from my position had I stayed. The agency I worked at was not flexible about probation periods. My supervisor told me that she was not going to recommend me for continued employment, and there was no way by which the agency could extend my probation period.
I usually try to make it seem like I am trying to better serve their needs and usually go about it by telephone to let them know I am trying to better assist them and wanted to make sure I understood with absolute certainty what they needed. I also try to get to know them on a personal level and take a customer service approach to my position. I try to do my best to make judgments, but I think I look more incompetent when I make an incorrect judgment than when I ask for clarifications of their needs.

Honestly, I don't think there is such a thing as asking too many questions and that making you seem incompetent. How else will you learn if you never ask?

Also, if you have the ability to learn programming on your own, I don't think you'd need the CS degree with already having your degrees. Then, you can include them under your skills section of your resume.

Have you looked into studying to take actuary exams with a math background?
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Old 10-24-2013, 02:10 PM
 
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I still think it's something in your personality that's letting you down. I don't mean this to sound harsh, but it's really strange that you would give up on a field you basically dedicated 5 or more years of education to, just because one job was a bad fit. To me, you have the perfect explanation for why you resigned from your previous job. You can just say it wasn't the right fit for you because you were not enjoying government type work, and that's why you want to transition to a corporate accounting type role.

Before you even THINK about going back to school or giving up on your accounting career, you need to network more. Identify folks that are doing the job you want, and start talking with them. You are well-educated AND have work experience (I know you think it's not good experience, but these days that beats the hell out of the NO experience most of your peers have) in a field (accounting) that has pretty good employment prospects.

I think what you need above all else (and much more than a CS degree) is an attitude adjustment and more savvy regarding the employment search process, networking, and just being an adult in the real world. If you don't fix this and work on these "soft skills", a CS degree won't do you much good, as you'll probably be right back in teh same position, except just older.

BTW, I know this whole "network" "network" thing sounds old and tired, and some kind of Baby Boomer fortune cookie wisdom to throw at youngsters that can't get jobs. I'd generally agree that it doesn't work for everyone. If you are some liberal arts grad toiling at minimum wage at a grocery store, yea you might have a hard time getting your calls/e-mails returned or people to speak with you during some kind of networking event. But you have a degree in a marketable field, AND work experience. I guarantee people will want to speak to you to offer advice. And make sure it goes both ways. Reach out to folks that YOU might be able to help and advise. Younger grads that might be looking into gov't audit work, for example. You never know, that can pay off for you as well.

Good luck!
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