Accountant

My best advice for getting started, pick a school and start working on that bachelor's degree. The best opportunities are those that you can pursue once you have a bachelor's and then after that it's what you can pursue once you have a CPA. So I would say my best advice is figure out what school you want to go to.

How to get started as an accountant is just to go get a job. You can get a job as a clerk, helping to keep records, whether it's paying bills for a company or sending out invoices, accounts receivable, accounts payable, clerks are often good starting jobs, but if you want to get serious about the profession, you will need to go to school and get an accounting degree. If you want to become a certified public accountant, of course, you'll need a certain amount of accredited hours. Each state is different on what they require and for their certifications, and usually it's 150 qualifying hours, but again, every state's different. So some states will require bachelor's, some will require master's.

So some advice about getting started in accounting is from a grizzled old CPA myself. I would say check off all the boxes that you can early in your career. Meaning that if you want to become a CPA, do it as quickly as you possibly can. Go to work for one of the big firms, one of the big four if you possibly can and just kind of get all those things sort of taken care of even though it's a bit of a slog and it may take you an additional two, three, four, five years to accomplish all that. But I can tell you as somebody who did that early in my career right out of college that the dividends have paid throughout the rest of my career. Even this last position that I got when they saw that I had the big four experience on my resume, they were like that meant a lot to them. So if you've got the opportunity to get those things done, take them off early.