Despite the gloomy headlines, the outlook for hiring in finance and
accounting should be strong for 2008. “You see a lot in the press
that’s negative, and there are problems with the economy,” says Josh
Warborg, Robert Half International district president in Seattle. “The
fact of the matter is we’re seeing an expanded economy and expanding
jobs.”
For accountants at all levels, that means lots of
opportunities. At Bryant University in Smithfield, Rhode Island, only a
couple dozen of the 125 accounting majors set to graduate in June don’t
have job offers yet. “If your GPA is a 2.2, you’ll get a job,” says
Dennis Bline, PhD, professor of accounting. “If you make it a 3.2, your
issue is which good job offer to take because you’ll have multiple
offers.”
Demand is just as strong for mid-level accountants. Glenn Dubiel, vice president of
Spherion Professional Services,
says his firm is seeing a shortage of accounting professionals with one
to seven years’ experience across all industries. “There’s just a
natural shortage of those workers,” he says.
At the top, Warborg says treasurers and
chief financial officers are
in short supply. “We’re seeing strong increases in demand for them at
small- to medium-sized companies with sales of less than $250 million,”
he says.
The trends feeding demand for accountants aren’t
likely to end soon. “The Baby Boomers [who] are retiring in the next
five years are going to fuel demand for accountants, despite what may
happen in the economy at large,” Warborg says. “And the effects from
SOX and other compliance initiatives are still having an impact on the
financial sector. Those two forces provide assurance that, even in
tough economic times, accountants’ skills will be in demand.”
Math Majors Rule
For math and
actuarial science majors,
the hiring market is “phenomenal,” says Kristin Kennedy, PhD, chair of
Bryant’s actuarial math department. “My seniors [are] being given
offers plus nice signing bonuses of around $10,000,” she says.
Applied
math and statistics undergraduates are also being snapped up by
forecasting companies, government agencies and investment banks.
“Companies are doing a lot of number crunching,” she says. “If you come
out with four SAS courses and you get a certificate in SAS, that’s very
marketable.”
Many other companies are seeking
quantitative analysts who
know statistics and programming, says Dr. Al Lee, director of
quantitative analysis for PayScale. “Companies like Google want the
same people, so there is competition for those skills, and those jobs
are paying a couple hundred thousand dollars a year,” he says.
Banking Slumps
With the credit crunch leading to massive layoffs in
mortgage banking,
Peter Nigro, associate professor of finance at Bryant, is warning
students looking at banking to take what they can get. “I don’t expect
a lot of financial institutions to be hiring in the spring,” he says.
He is pointing students toward jobs with federal bank regulatory
agencies that will be beefing up staff to deal with the ongoing credit
crisis as well as changes brought on by the Basel II international
banking standards agreement.
The outlook is rather gloomy in
investment banking. A number of big financial services players have
instituted soft hiring freezes, says compensation expert Alan Johnson,
managing partner of Johnson Associates in New York City. “They’re going
to end 2008 with fewer people than they began with,” he says. “They’re
reducing college recruiting by 50 percent and cutting back on
entry-level and middle-level hiring. They’re doing that unofficially --
no one wants to be the poster child of hard times.”
Some
finance niches are still looking good, however. Having experience with
enterprise resource planning makes one very marketable to large firms,
Dubiel says. And at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio,
executive-in-residence David Payne is still optimistic about financial
services despite the employment slump. “Depending upon how you measure
it, financial services is one of the fastest-growing areas of our
economy, notwithstanding the credit crunch,” says Payne, a former
banking executive.
The issues that have plagued the
residential real estate market have not hit the commercial sector as
hard, so positions such as property manager will still be important in
2008, Lee says. And credit and risk analysts remain important to
companies seeking to learn from past mistakes in extending risky
credit. “Unfortunately, collections specialists may have more work than
usual,” he adds.
This article originally appeared on Monster.com.
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