While you may take NCEA Accounting with the view of having a successful career as a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), this isn’t the only area the NCEA Accounting can lead to. Just having a basic understanding of accounting systems and how financial transactions are recorded can be a useful skill that will help you in almost every career option imaginable.
Financial Careers with NCEA Accounting
Accounting makes people think of careers like hedge fund managers, stockbrokers, and accountants. Yet, while a solid understanding of accountancy is an excellent basis for any financial role, the variations in skills mean that you will also need to balance this with economics and business management.
With the New Zealand education system, there is flexibility (where your school allows), to take some achievement standards for business management and include them under the “NCEA Accounting” umbrella. You can also count your accounting unit standards towards both the minimum numeracy and literacy points required.
Because of the range of roles that fit under the job title “Accountant”, and the variety of industries you can find yourself in, becoming an accountant can be a great goal. Whether you are on the Board of Governors for a school, looking after the financial interests and tax obligations of multiple businesses, or working for a large international firm, there is a lot of room to move.
A degree in accounting will generally cost less than $20,000 in New Zealand, add in the registration process costing around $6,000, and you’ve got a career where the average income is over $80,000 and relatively little student debt. Better yet, according to MBIE, financial jobs are here to stay for quite some time. Statistics NZ data shows that after finishing a bachelor's degree in Accounting, 79% of graduates are employed in New Zealand and 13% head overseas.
Non-Financial Careers with NCEA Accounting
These are some of the criteria that you can achieve with various accounting unit standards:
- Demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of management accounting to inform decision-making.
- Prepare a comprehensive report for an external user that interprets the annual report of a New Zealand reporting entity
- Demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of a contemporary accounting issue for decision-making.
- Lead an area of production in an entertainment and event technology context
- Demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of a job cost subsystem for an entity.
This is across levels 1, 2, and 3; and includes a range of different accounting-based achievement standards. However, as you can see Accounting isn’t about learning how to read a balance sheet (although that can certainly be part of it), and taking NCEA Accounting provides a broader financial awareness.
These skills become relevant if you head towards a career in office administration, want to gain a trade apprenticeship, become a rock star, or work in your local library.
NCEA Accounting isn’t about gaining financial literacy so that you can pay your taxes. These are things that you will see complaints about regarding the American education system but do not apply to most people in New Zealand working in an automated tax system. Of course, learning about how our tax system works for salary and wage earners paying PAYE can help you become a more aware citizen, particularly when it's time to vote and people are struggling to understand which party position will provide the best economic outlook for the majority of people.
Reasons to avoid NCEA Accounting
Of course, there are jokes about how boring accounting is, but those are made by people who don’t actually understand what those in the financial industries do – and usually made by people who are struggling with their financial illiteracy, so don’t worry about that.
A better reason to avoid taking accounting is that once you have some basic knowledge of how to read financial transactions, you’ll find yourself questioning a lot of financial decisions others take for granted. Is it cheaper to buy the item on ‘interest-free’ terms and keep the money in your bank account earning interest… or do the hidden fees cost more than the interest you’d make? Then there are things like reading the balance sheet or financial records of businesses that want to work with you; yes, their bottom line looks good, but the amount of outgoings spent on employees seems very low, why could that be? Yes, NCEA Accounting can quite easily make you suspicious.
Passing NCEA Accounting isn’t too hard, you’ve got access to all the past exams and questions for each unit standard. You’ve even got free access to marked accounting exams with comments by the markers. However, getting your NCEA credits is just the start.
You can end up with tertiary qualifications (don’t forget to look into scholarship level NCEA Accounting), however, Professional Development is a constant for those with an interest in the financial world. Other than staying up to date with changes in legislation, those in accounting and finance fields need to stay up to date with changes in technology, global communication, sustainability, business interests, management, governance, and risk.
Transferable Skills or a Stable Career
For some people, the idea of being in the same job from the moment they leave high school until the day they retire sounds like heaven. For others, this sounds like a living nightmare. Thankfully taking NCEA accounting can set you up on both paths – potentially at the same time if you want.
Because becoming an accountant is a solid career option, with an expectation of steady growth for these roles in the coming years, this is certainly an option for those that want some consistency in their lives, with room to be promoted within an organisation or branch out into your own business as the desire arises.
However, accountancy skills are a desirable asset for anyone entering the business world, from sales and marketing people to entrepreneurs. If you want to work as a school librarian, you’ll have transferable skills that allow you to negotiate with publishing companies and distributors to meet your budgets. If you are working in the arts industry, you’ll have transferable skills that allow you to create proposals for fundraising grants, as well as generate expense reports and production budgets. There aren’t many careers where understanding accounting principles would be seen as a negative!
I’m Too Creative to Take Accounting
Too many people think that if you’re creative, or if you are “bad” at maths, then you have no place taking NCEA accounting. However, they’re wrong! Creative people who take accounting have more control over their artistic endeavours, but on the other side of the coin, accountants with a creative side can thrive in the profession due to being able to think outside the box and look at problems with new eyes.
This could include coming up with creative solutions to solve a budget crisis that would otherwise lead to layoffs or a clever way to work with a marketing team to ensure more “bang for buck” on an investment.
As with most things, finding the balance between knowing the rules, and knowing when to break them is a key component of financial management.
I’m Failing Maths, I Don’t Want to Fail NCEA Accounting
Accounting is telling a story with numbers. However, just as you can write a story without being able to spell (ask any author, so few are great spellers – that’s why editors and proof-readers will always be an author’s best friend), so you can read a balance sheet without being able to make the calculations in your head.
Long gone are the days where you needed to use an abacus and your brain to make complex calculations, now technology can do the calculations for you. What you do need to do is to be able to see patterns. After a while, you will start to see a general flow to most financial reports that will allow you to immediately see when something doesn’t look right, and you will know to go into a report and find why it’s not right. You may not notice an error of $0.10 but you will notice when someone has miskeyed that as $0.001 or $1.00 and the following calculations have produced strange figures that don’t fit with the rest of the balance sheet.
Of course, most financial people also use software, and the ability to manipulate this becomes more important than knowing your 9 times table and basic algebra.
So, while an understanding of the underlying principles of maths is very helpful, you will find that being “good” at maths is irrelevant – particularly if you have a brain that can easily memorise some of the formulas.
Success through NCEA Accounting
Although it is hard for most teenagers to realise, high school is just the start of a life of learning. While passing NCEA with an Excellence across the board has some definite benefits, such as financial payments and easier access to tertiary courses, it isn’t the only thing to consider. If you aren’t sure about what career might interest you, and few people are, NCEA allows you to test out different subjects in a safe environment.
If you’re torn between accounting and art, try them both at the NCEA level. You don’t have to take them both through to university – and in fact, once you’re at university you’ll often find that having a broad knowledge of different subjects serves you much better than having stuck with a narrow base at high school.
Taking subjects that interest you is as important as taking subjects that you feel will put you on the path you want to be on – but the knowledge you’ll gain from NCEA accounting will serve you well in the long run.
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