How important will tech skills be for accounting?

<span style="background-color: rgb(253, 253, 253);">Hello Joseph, Having technical skills is critical to the future of the profession. I would recommend in addition to your accounting major perhaps consider be a double major or minor such as data analytics. Being able to extract data and understand the story will be critical to success.</span>

Hi Joseph,

Tech skills are definitely important to have in accounting. However, most people learn these on the job. I've seen many associates at my firm who don't know how to do many things in excel, such as pivot tables, but are able to learn either from co-workers or online trainings. Additionally, trainings are provided for more difficult softwares, such as alteryx and tableau. As long as you are willing and eager to learn, not having many technical capabilities should not be too much of a hindrance

I have been working in public accounting, specifically in Tax, for about 1 year and I have found technology skills to be essential in my day to day life. I am working with large sets of data and am challenged to analyze the data and present it to management in the most summarized way possible. I utilize Excel and Alteryx for these tasks. In addition, I have created technology solutions (using BOTS) to automate some of the repetitive tasks that I do. Automation is so important in today's business world. If you can gain the skills to analyze data and built technology solutions, you will be successful in the changing accounting world.

Technology will continue to become more integrated in most jobs including accounting. I know that it can be daunting to hear that as someone who isn't the most familiar with technology. However, the great part is that you can always learn new technology skills throughout your career. For accounting, I would say that excel is still king when it comes to technology/software used in accounting. There are tons of resources that you can access through a Google search to learn and grow your excel skills. Also, data analytics is becoming a major part of accounting as well. I would recommend that you take a few data analytics courses in college and familiarize yourself with Tableau and Alteryx.

Hi Joseph, great question! Tech skills will only continue to be needed more and more in the accounting field and they are currently highly sought after in most industries, including accounting. At the big four firm where I work (PwC), we are currently in the middle of a firm-wide digital initiative where the the firm is rolling out multiple ways for staff to digitization/automation their current processes across all lines of service (Assurance, Advisory, Internal, etc.). Additionally, employees are being offered trainings on software such as Alteryx and Tableau, which are now required (at a beginner level) at every level within the firm. So, it would be great if you could stay ahead of the curve and become seemingly well-versed with these technological platforms and continue working on gaining a general idea of what these digital platforms do and how they help to automate processes in our industry!