Have to make a major career decision in the next few months, any advice?
I’m a 24 year old recent graduate from a masters of accounting program. I interned with two places during my grad program. One is smaller ~1,000 total employees, the other is a Big 4 firm. I received return offers from both and started working at the smaller employer last year full-time.
In my currently role I’m technically not doing strictly accounting work, more like finance/operations work. This job has incredible work life balance, time off policies, very friendly work environment, 10 minute commute along with WFH 2 days a week. I also have an essentially guaranteed path to promotion come later this year that will also come with a pretty nice pay bump (I would guess I would be at about ~90-100k). The promotion would also put me into a “Manager” role but I wouldn’t really be managing anyone, nice title though. At the same time, going down this path feels like I’m pretty much tossing accounting away forever. There’s no reason to get my CPA in this role and even if I wanted to there’s no CPAs at my current job to sign off on experience. I wouldn’t be working in accounting at all once the role change happens. I have some internal aspirations to be very knowledgeable in my chosen field and not sure if I’ll find that here. I don’t know as much about operations as a career path and didn’t anticipate this to be a route I could take.
The other job I would start as your basic Audit Associate making ~90k out the gate. But if you know public accounting you know that I’d be working 60-70+ hour weeks for some parts of the year. The environment is definitely more sink or swim, and my commute would go from 10 minutes to 45-1hr each way. At the same time I feel like I would learn an incredible amount, get my CPA, and be able to build a solid knowledge base that would be applicable almost anywhere. The very structured promotion path is also appealing, I would likely be a senior within three years and pushing 110-120k total comp with nice exit opportunities if I wish to do so.
Really just interested in any advice you all may have. Is there really a wrong decision here? I’ve been mulling on this for months and worried that either decision could end negatively for different reasons.