3 Powerful Ways to Jumpstart Your Accounting Career While Still in College
Let’s travel back in time to ten years ago. Honestly, if you were an accounting or finance student with a strong GPA, you could have landed a great job in the U.S. job market.
These days? It takes more than a strong GPA, that’s for sure. The accounting/finance job market is tight, and everyone knows it.
Firms are more selective, competition is higher, and you can’t just do what you’re told in school to guarantee yourself a job after graduation.
The students who get the best internships and full-time offers differentiate themselves early, before graduation.
Below are three practical, proven ways to jumpstart your accounting career while you’re still in school and put yourself ahead of the majority of other students.
1. Join an Accounting Club, Then Actually Do Something
A lot of students join clubs just to list them on a resume. I’ve seen it on resumes and LinkedIn profiles. I saw a lot of my classmates list out their clubs on their resumes, but then actually attend less than two meetings during the semester.
These days, you have to join clubs that actually matter in the accounting world, such as:
To benefit from these clubs the most, participation alone isn’t enough. You have to become a student officer, get involved, actively put yourself into events, network with professionals that come to speak at your meetings, etc.
Students who hold officer positions or take visible leadership roles get noticed far more by recruiters – especially Big 4 and mid-tier public accounting firms that actively engage with these clubs. Most vice presidents and presidents of these types of clubs go on to internship at Big 4 firms or take accounting internships in well-known companies in the area.
And what if your school doesn’t have an accounting club? Then start one.
It’s pretty easy to start a university accounting club: just get a professor who will be a sponsor, grab a few friends, get ChatGPT to draft you a club constitution, get a classroom after class to meet in, and send some emails out to some speakers to talk to the org during the semester. It will look fantastic on the resume, as it signals initiative, leadership, and genuine interest in your career.
2. Use LinkedIn Like a Networking Machine
A lot of students don’t realize this until it’s too late, but LinkedIn is pretty crucial to the accounting/finance profession. Professional networks in the accounting/finance world are really tight (tighter than you think), even in big cities.
Most students unfortunately use LinkedIn very passively, but you shouldn’t. LinkedIn is actually one of the most powerful career tools if you use it intentionally. Here is how you should use it:
1. Fix Your Profile
You need to fix up your profile. Don’t write a whole essay on there, but make it intentional. Don’t let people be embarrassed to connect with you – be professional and have a well-rounded headline, biography, profile picture, etc. You don’t have to have any experience to have a nice, professional profile.
2. Connect with Others, Intentionally and Strategically
Search for and start connecting with:
Local Accounting Professionals, CPAs, public/industry accountants in your area
Early-career recruiters (accounting firms and large companies typically have early-career recruiters)
Accounting Professionals at companies you are specifically targeting for internships/full-time roles
3. Send Short, Respectful Cold Messages
When you try to connect with these professionals on LinkedIn, you’ll get a pop-up that lets you send a message along with the connection request.
Use this – 100%. Some people won’t connect with you if they don’t know you, and they won’t know you unless you introduce yourself. A simple message works:
“Hi ____,
My name is ____ and I am an accounting student at XXXX University. I saw your profile and wanted to reach out as I am interested in your career path and would love to chat with you about your experiences.
Thank you!
LinkedIn has a pretty strict character count (up to 200 or 300 characters) – so it’s best to keep these messages brief but intentional.
3. Build Skills That Actually Get You Hired
Honestly, employers don’t really care that you “took accounting classes”, because every single candidate took the same classes. The coursework might get you in the interview, but it doesn’t actually set you apart.
What will make you different from other candidates is actually demonstrating that you have more than the minimum requirements for the job. Having skills/experience will definitely help you in this process.
Technical Skills
The most valuable technical skills for early-career accountants aren’t complicated, but most students never bother to learn them outside of class:
Excel proficiency goes way beyond knowing how to type a formula. Employers want to see that you can build pivot tables to quickly summarize and analyze data, use XLOOKUP (which has largely replaced VLOOKUP in modern workplaces), and ideally have some exposure to Power Query for cleaning and transforming messy data. There are tons of classes out there that have practice datasets for you to play around with.
These aren’t advanced programming skills – they’re everyday tools that working accountants use constantly, and you can learn the basics in a few weekends of focused practice.
Accounting software experience is another easy win. If you can get your hands on QuickBooks (they often have student versions or trials), spend some time actually using it. Set up a fake company, enter some transactions, run reports. Even basic familiarity with how accounting software works gives you an advantage over candidates who’ve only ever worked in spreadsheets and textbooks. A part-time accounting job will put you miles ahead in an interview.
Financial analysis fundamentals matter too. Can you look at a set of financial statements and actually understand what’s going on? Can you perform a basic reconciliation, identify discrepancies, and explain what might have caused them? These are skills you’ll use every single day in an accounting role.
Communication Skills
This is the one that surprises most students: your ability to explain numbers in plain English is often more valuable than your technical skills.
Partners and managers spend a huge amount of their time translating financial data into language that non-accountants can understand. Clients, executives, and colleagues in other departments don’t want to hear jargon – they want to know what the numbers mean and what they should do about it.
Start practicing this now. When you’re working on a case study or assignment, challenge yourself to explain your findings as if you were talking to someone who never took an accounting class. If you can break down a complex concept into simple terms without losing accuracy, you become incredibly valuable.
Professional Discipline
This last category might sound basic, but it’s where a shocking number of candidates fail:
Email etiquette matters more than you think. Partners and managers notice when someone sends a clear, well-organized email versus a rambling wall of text. Learn to write emails with a clear subject line, a brief context, a specific ask, and a professional sign-off. It takes practice.
Time management shows up immediately in internships. Can you juggle multiple tasks? Can you prioritize when everything feels urgent? Start building these habits now with your coursework – it directly translates to the workplace.
Asking clear questions is a skill that will serve you your entire career. When you’re stuck or confused, the way you ask for help matters. “I don’t get it” is useless. “I’ve tried X and Y, and I’m stuck on Z – here’s what I think might be the issue, but I’m not sure” shows that you’ve actually thought about the problem and respect the other person’s time.
Here’s the thing about all of these skills: even a few hours a week invested into building them compounds quickly. By the time you’re interviewing for internships or full-time roles, you’ll have stories to tell and examples to give that 90% of other candidates simply won’t have.
Final Thoughts
I don’t like to sugarcoat anything, so the truth is that the accounting job market is not what it used to be. You can find out why in one of my other posts.
The good news is that most students still aren’t doing these things, and there are still plenty of ways to get ahead of the competition. Do these three things consistently in school, and you’ll definitely separate yourself from the pack.
The students landing the best opportunities aren’t the smartest ones in the room – they’re the ones who took action early and actually put thought into their careers.
Start now. Your future self will thank you, and it will pay dividends down the line when you have a great job.