Looking for a career with low unemployment, a respectable salary, and good job prospects? 

With an unemployment rate of 3 percent, roughly half of the national average, accountants currently are in high demand here and across the country, says Rick Betts, managing partner at the Spokane office of Seattle-based accounting firm Moss Adams LLP. 

Moss Adams typically has one to five openings for experienced accountants, says Betts, depending on the time of year. And most public accounting firms have some need to hire people at any given time, he contends.

“There will continue to be low unemployment as long as there continues to be more regulatory requirements and other governmental reporting requirements,” Betts says. “There is extensive reporting for public companies and others that fall in that jurisdiction.” 

Even during the Great Recession, he says, by and large public accounting firms didn’t suffer as much as other companies. 

“There wasn’t significant change for people employed as public accountants,” he says.  

Regardless of whether the economy is contracting or growing fast, accounting functions don’t diminish much. “We went through 2008 until now with a little bit of a slowdown, but it amounted to only small staffing reductions and flat wages,” he says.  

Dianne LaValley, senior staffing manager and vice president at Spokane’s Accountemps, a division of Robert Half Finance & Accounting, based in Menlo Park, Calif., says she gets 10 to 20 new requests from employers every week seeking accounting employees. “But it’s not just Spokane,” LaValley says. “This is happening on a national basis.”  

Tax accountants top the list of positions Spokane employers are looking to fill, she says. 

“Tax accountants are really hard to find,” she says. “People are also looking for cost accountants, credit managers, payroll and accounts receivable clerks, managers, and controllers. It is definitely an employee’s marketplace.” 

U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics show the median annual wage for accountants and auditors in May 2014 was $72,500, and the projected growth for the profession through 2022 is 13 percent compared to 11 percent, the average growth rate for all occupations.

On average, accounting jobs in Spokane pay about 82 percent of the national average, or about $60,000, says LaValley. “Seattle pay, though. is 118 percent of the national average,” she says. “So that gives you a good idea of the differences in pay statewide.” Accountemps, which has nearly 350 office locations worldwide, provides temporary staffing as well as temporary-to-hire staffing. 

Job prospects for accountants and auditors who have earned advanced professional recognition, especially as Certified Public Accountants, or those who have other advanced degrees, are considered to have the best employment prospects, according to the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook.

Job prospects are particularly favorable, employment analysts say, because the need for accounting services has grown in response to corporate scandals and recent financial crises, which has increased scrutiny and spawned new financial regulations. 

The Enron scandal in 2001, along with other high-profile bookkeeping scandals, ushered in an era of new rules and federal oversight in the accounting industry, they say.

The Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, commonly referred to as the Dodd-Frank Act, was signed into federal law in 2010 as a response to the Great Recession, and it brought the most significant changes to financial regulation in the United States since the regulatory reform that followed the Great Depression.

It made changes in the American financial regulatory environment that affect all regulatory agencies and almost every part of the nation’s financial services industry, says Eastern Washington University’s Arsen Djatej, an accounting and information systems professor. 

 “Since the Dodd-Frank Act, which was a response to the financial crisis, there is much more regulation and oversight,” Djatej says. 

The financial crisis has driven accounting education as well, says Martine Duchatelet, dean of the College of Business and Public Administration, at EWU’s Riverpoint campus. 

She says there are four distinct categories where accounting students typically work—public accounting, governmental accounting, private companies, and self-employment. She adds that accountants who have risen to management level are now baby boomers, many of whom are just starting to retire. “So demand to hire for those positions will be increasing,” she says.

Duchatelet says every year the number of EWU students getting a degree in accounting increases by 5 percent to 10 percent. “In 10 years, the number of accounting degrees we have awarded has doubled,” she says. 

Betts says Moss Adam’s recruits employees on college campuses.

“We actively recruit on all campuses in our region,” he says. “And many accounting majors will start their careers in public accounting.”

Public accounting firms largely hire students out of college and train them specifically for that company’s expectations and standards, he adds. 

“Students like to go into public accounting first because they learn a lot of aspects about accounting and tax as it relates to all different businesses and companies,” Betts says.

He says for those students who have reasonably good grades and accomplished resumes, there are many interested firms, and hiring can be highly competitive. “There’s a lot of jobs for those students and no unemployment for those kinds of students,” he says. 

Students with lower grades and who are less qualified will still have opportunities in the marketplace, he adds. 

However, opportunities decrease based on the strength of their college career, he says. 

The starting salary for someone in public accounting in this region, Betts says, is between $35,000 and $50,000, depending on the firm. “For upper level accountants at firms like Moss Adams, the pay range can go from the starting salary up to $175,000 depending on the firm and the years of experience an employee has,” he says. 

Accounting is the language of business, Betts says, and even for students who don’t major in it, accounting can help students in whatever field they go into.

EWU’s Duchatelet says the accounting profession is driven by a global economy.  “Trends in the accounting profession are driven by a global economy and ethical standards,” she says.

“Right now one of the hottest fields is forensic accounting—CSI for white-collar crime,” she says. 

Another trend in academia is the need for education regarding global accounting standards. In the U.S., accountants must abide by Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) standards. Globally, the reporting standards—the International Financial Reporting Standards—are designed as a common global language for business affairs so that company accounts are understandable and comparable across international boundaries. 

GAAP refers to the standard framework of guidelines for financial accounting used in any given jurisdiction; generally known as accounting standards or standard accounting practices. These include the standards, conventions, and rules that accountants follow in recording and summarizing and in the preparation of financial statements.

“The world with the Internet has become global, so students must understand other systems,” says Djatej.