This document compares careers in IT and accounting. It notes that both fields involve 40-hour work weeks so choosing a career path requires consideration. Accounting involves managing financial statements and communicating information to a company, while IT roles range from technical to coding work with constant changes. The document advises asking yourself questions about your preferred work style and priorities before deciding. Both fields use analytics and require degrees, with 86% of IT employers and 98% of accounting employers preferring a bachelor's degree or higher. While the fields have some similarities, accounting work focuses more on financial statements while IT work involves more practical and specific technical roles with new challenges. Travel is more common for accountants. In the end, reflection is needed to determine the

1. Which Industry Is Better, IT Or
Accounting?
Which field is more worth going into?
Deciding whether to work in IT or Accounting is a commonly asked question, but not many
have seemed to answer. We can’t make the decision for you, but we can definitely point you
in a direction where you understand a bit more. The first thing to remember is that these
fields are long term jobs with 40 hour work weeks, so you must be careful with what you’re
choosing!
We need to understand the basics of each industry before we break them down.
In Accounting, it will be your responsibility for managing financial statements. With the higher
role in the company, you are responsible for communicating statements (whether it’d be
financial or non-financial) that are entitled to the company or business.
In IT, the roles can range from practical technician work to coding and software-related
tasks. In this industry, you face constant changes and updates to further challenge your
skills.

2. Ask yourself these questions
Before jumping right in, you’ll need to ask yourself these questions to confirm your long term
career path. Since you are going to be here 40 hours a week for a good amount of years,
you must make sure you enjoy what you are doing!
Would you want to have a well-respected role
within the company?
Do you want to be working at a management
level?
Ask yourself, do you work better through
‘​Kinesthetic​’ or ‘​Visual​’ learning?
Do you lean to a more statistical or more
technical person?
Is the income a motivating factor / why you are
working in that field?
Knowing the similarities
IT and Accounting do have a fair few similarities, however. They share similarities, both in an
expected way and in ways you might not expect. They both have a unique work-life balance
alongside if you are happy with your career choice.
They both include a lot of mathematics and a fair amount of analysing analytics. The
analytics part is what people find the most surprising, as well, when do you use analytics in
IT? They’re incredibly useful when knowing the specifications of a certain piece of hardware,
or creating information systems. You use analytics a lot in an Accounting firm, especially
within cashflow for example.
A piece of data that is worth knowing about education-wise, is that both of these fields have
a significantly high number when it comes hiring. You see, 86% of employers prefer IT with a
Bachelors or higher, and 98% of employers prefer an Accountant with a bachelors, or a
master degree, or higher.
This information above shows clearly that to get a job within one of these industries, you
must have a good educational qualification. If you don’t have any of these qualifications, it is
worth looking into when looking at vacancies here in these fields. We have some examples
to help you research your way into a study below.
Some options worth knowing when going for
a degree to become a qualified accountant
are; CPA, CMA and the CIA degrees.
There’s a whole range for technology
qualifications. If you don’t know many

3. qualifications, these will be a good start to researching into; CCNP, MCSE and CompTIA A+.
Knowing the differences
You know the similarities, but when working in each industry, the jobs are a completely
different environment. To sum it up, Accountants will be spending more of their time
breaking down and detailing financial statements. They will spend their time reading through
accounting systems and books to help increase efficiency.
Comparing this to IT, it is made clear that the typical job duties are completely different.
Within IT, you’re more ‘practical’ as you are either coding or doing technician work, but the
job title is much more specific within this field in what you’re doing.
In Accounting, it’s always consistent. When you compare this to IT, you can see that they
are always facing new challenges, such as; new software, new operating systems etc. In
Accounting, it doesn’t change much, so essentially your tool belt is the same.
Another thing worth mentioning is that you travel much more on business trips as an
accountant, compared to the IT role. However, if you’re going for the money, a
non-management level would be IT, though its harder with the little number of job
placements compared to what it used to be for that role. Unless you can prove your quality
work and skills.
Conclusion
From reading this article, you should have
a better understanding of which field of IT
and Accounting you would rather go into.
Perhaps you are still unsure, and that is
perfectly reasonable. It takes a while to be
more comfortable in your direction of
career path, but we hope this article has
helped develop your understanding and
we hope that you can click away from this
article feeling like you can reflect on
something that will help further develop
your choice.
References
86% of employers prefer IT technicians with a bachelors degree or higher.​BurningGlass.com (analysis of 1,715,856 computer science job
postings, Dec. 1, 2014 – Nov. 30, 2015)
98% of employers prefer accountants with a bachelors degree or higher. ​ BurningGlass.com (analysis of 292,829 accounting job postings,
Dec. 1, 2014 – Nov. 30, 2015)