Moving from practice to industry in finance

Most qualified accountants in practice consider this move. Many make it in the two or three years after qualifying, and the ones who are happiest afterwards thought about it as a change of job rather than a change of employer.

What actually changes

In practice you have many clients and a defined piece of each of them. In industry you have one business and, over time, most of it.

That is the whole trade. Breadth for depth. You stop seeing a new set of accounts every few weeks and start understanding one company well enough to know why the numbers do what they do, which is a different and slower kind of interesting.

The second change is accountability. In practice you review, advise and sign off on someone else’s decisions. In industry the decisions are yours, or they belong to someone who will hold you responsible for the information behind them. People consistently underestimate how different that feels.

The timing that works

The window most people use is the first two or three years after qualifying. Technical training is recent, employers recruit deliberately at that stage, and you have not yet specialised so far into audit or one sector that an industry role looks like a sideways step.

Moving later works. It narrows the field towards roles that value what you specialised in, which is fine if that is where you want to be and limiting if it is not.

What practice prepares you for, and what it does not

It prepares you extremely well for technical accounting, for working to deadlines that do not move, and for walking into an unfamiliar situation and orienting quickly. Those are genuinely valuable and industry employers know it.

It prepares you less well for three things.

Ambiguity about what the answer should be. In practice there is usually a standard. In industry there is often a judgement, and the person making it is you.

Influencing people who do not report to you and do not particularly want to talk about finance. A great deal of an industry finance role is persuading operational managers to care about a number.

And the pace. Month end is relentless in a way that busy season is not, because it happens every month.

Choosing where to land

Size shapes the job more than sector does. A small business means broad responsibility quickly and less support when you are stuck. A large one means a defined role, more structure and a slower path to seeing the whole picture.

Neither is better. What matters is being honest about which suits you, because a newly qualified accountant who wants breadth will be frustrated in a large group reporting team, and one who wants to do a job properly before adding another will struggle as the only finance person in a growing company.

The question to ask at interview

Ask what the last month end looked like. Not the process on paper, the actual one.

How long it took, what went wrong, and what the finance team was doing on the last working day. The answer tells you more about the job than the job description does, and how freely it is given tells you about the team.