 Step one, click on one of my videos. Step two, smash like. Step three, um, step four, profit. No, but seriously, my viewers know the rules. Before this video even begins, let's give the like button a smash. What's happening guys? So a little bit ago, I decided to audit my YouTube account and I posted a poll asking you guys what kind of videos that you want me to make. And it seemed like a lot of you wanted me to make a video about being an accounting major. And I'd also like to give a quick prayer to our accountant brothers and sisters that have probably been working 80 hours a week since January 1st. And now since the stimulus bill extended the tax season for another two or three months, they're probably going to be working even more. You guys are awesome. Keep up all the good work. Anyways, this video is going to be all about accounting. And I'm going to be talking about the salary, job satisfaction, demand and also x factors that are going to be important for this career. And right now I'm trying out this style of content just to see if you guys like it. And if the evil YouTube algorithm likes it, and I'll do a few videos like this. And if they work out, then I'll do a lot more in the future. So first of all, this is just an overview of an accounting degree and some of the stuff that you do in a job after you get an accounting degree, I'm going to go over some of the important factors. And at the end, I'm going to give it a score or a rating out of 10, but don't ever go into a career or a degree just because it has good statistics or I give it a high rating on one of these videos. Make sure that you actually have an interest in the subject. And as always, this is just my opinion, make sure you do your own research before you make any life changing decisions. Alright, so first let's talk about salary. So one of the great things about an accounting degree, which I'm going to touch on a lot more later, is the fact that it's extremely flexible, like many business degrees, there's a ton of flexibility in the direction that you can take your career. You can become an accountant or an auditor, a financial analyst, a personal financial advisor, or even a financial manager. So to put these numbers in perspective, the median annual wage for all occupations is around $38,600. And for business occupations, it's around $68,300. Accountants are also often really business savvy, and they can end up in high ranking positions in companies like CEO or vice president. On top of this, let's say you just choose one particular job. Let's say you go with accountant, for instance, there's so many different career paths that you can go down. There's a ton of different certifications you can get. There's a ton of different industries you can work in. And all of these are going to have completely different salaries. Now there are several different variations of accounting degrees. But when you start, you can expect to earn in the mid $50,000 a year range. And then after the 10 year mark, you can earn somewhere around $88,000 to $130,000 a year. And this shows that although you may start off low, there's a ton of growth and opportunity here for what you can make in the future. Overall, this one's really tough to pin down on exactly how much you can make because there's just so many different routes you can take in so many different industries that you can go into. But I'm going to give this one a score of nine. This is definitely one where you can get to six figures if that's your goal. And there's not that many four year degrees that will allow you to do that. And next, we're going to talk about something that for most people is probably even more important than pay. And that is job satisfaction. So overall, accounting can get kind of a bad rap here. Many people probably see accounting as kind of tedious and boring. And there is some truth to that. On a personal level, a girl that I went to high school with went into accounting without really looking into what the day to day tasks are. And within a few months, she basically told me that she hated her job. Luckily, accounting is pretty flexible. So she was able to transition into becoming a recruiter. And she liked that job a lot more. So I'm really happy to say that that turned out well for her. But she was really pushing her luck by not researching it. There are specific types of people that might really enjoy the tedious kind of nature of bookkeeping and all that sort of thing when it comes to accounting. And I think it's important that you realize what you're getting into before you fully commit to something. And there's several ways that you can examine the job satisfaction of any specific career. First, let's look at the percentage of people that thinks that whatever job they do makes the world a better place. In other words, how meaningful is their work? And when we look at this, accounting related degrees tend to fall in the mid to low 40s. Overall, this is a bit below average, especially when you compare it to health degrees like nursing, which comes in at like 83% or other healthcare degrees, which come in in the 80s. It's also lower than other math-related degrees such as engineering. But I think it's important that we keep this in perspective because it's actually relatively decent when you compare it to other business degrees such as international business or marketing. And business careers can tend to be relatively money-oriented and you can kind of lose sight into what you originally went into the career for. But meaning is only part of the equation when it comes to job satisfaction. For instance, if your job was to play video games all day long, it would probably have relatively low meaning but relatively high job satisfaction. And this seems to be the case with accounting as it does come in at about 71% job satisfaction, which is above average. This is higher than a lot of the other career paths in business and it even comes close to being around the same as some of the engineering career paths. Now, I've talked a lot on this channel about how you need to make about $70,000 a year for your happiness to be at its highest. After $70,000 a year, it doesn't really increase all that much. So I always say 70-75,000 a year somewhere around there is what you should aim for. And accounting easily hits that $70,000 a year mark. It can even get up to over six figures a year. So overall, I'm going to go ahead and give this one a seven in job satisfaction. Next, we're going to talk about demand. Now, looking at all the career paths that I mentioned before, accountant, auditor, financial analyst, financial advisor and financial manager, you'll see that the demand is somewhere between six and seven percent, usually with an outlier of 16% for the financial manager. Now six to seven percent is above the average of five percent. So it's good, but not great. This is pretty low if you compare it to health careers like respiratory therapists, registered nurse or physician assistant, or if you compare it to tech careers like software developer. However, the good news is there is a ton of accounting jobs out there. So you likely won't have to move across the country in order to be able to get a good job. And on top of that, there's so many different paths that you can go down where there's a lot of opportunity and there's also a lot of jobs. Another thing to consider when you're thinking about demand is how essential is your job or in other words, how much does society need your job? Nearly all health careers, for instance, are extremely essential. Even if the apocalypse was happening, we would still have doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals that would be taking care of sick and injured people. But in my opinion, accounting is a relatively essential profession as well. Businesses will always need accountants to interpret the law, balance their books and do their taxes. So in my opinion, as long as we always have a government that makes new laws, we'll also always have accountants. Now there is a small possibility that a lot of jobs could be eliminated if the government ever simplified the tax system. But in my opinion, that's a long shot. Now the next thing in this category that you want to think about is automation and outsourcing. Now according to a 2013 study by Oxford University, accountants have a 98% chance of being automated. Willrobotstakemyjob.com shows that accounting has a 94% chance of being automated and a poll on the website showed that they have a 65% chance of being automated according to the opinions of people who took the poll. And I'm not going to sugarcoat this, this is extremely high compared to a lot of other occupations. Now you guys know how biased I am against automation and specifically algorithms. In fact, one of my main hobbies, one of my main passions in life is figuring out how to make these videos in such a way where they smash the algorithm. And I honestly think some of these ratings are pretty controversial because they don't take a lot of human elements into consideration. For instance, this same paper thinks that waiters and waitresses have a 94% chance of automation, which I completely disagree with. I think one of the main reasons that people go out to restaurants is because they get that service and that human interaction. So no matter how advanced robots get, I think that people will always want to interact with other human beings. I think some of the lower level, more simple jobs like bookkeepers, yeah, sure, they're probably going to get automated or outsourced at some point. However, the laws are always changing, business is always changing and accountants are basically the humans that interpret the laws and they have what's known as finesse. And they can use this finesse in order to crunch the numbers and save you as much money as possible. And I think all jobs are going to be somewhat affected by AI and outsourcing and just streamlining of processes in general. But I still think that accounting is going to be relatively safe because usually when you solve one problem, three more problems pop up. And we will always need business savvy middlemen such as accountants in order to interpret the law and save us as much money as possible. And usually anything that involves the law moves at a snail's pace. So even if accounting does get to the point where it can be automated, it'll probably take several decades before the government even allows a machine to do it for you. Without being said, if you're thinking of going into this major, you do need to put a lot of thought into thinking about the career that you're going into and whether that's something that will be affected by automation. For instance, many accountants are supplementing their skills by learning the basics of computer programming such as Python. And if you're thinking about a particular accounting career and you think that it's something that can easily be outsourced to someone else or automated, then you probably don't want to go down that road. But overall, there's so much speculation about the future and nobody really knows for sure. But there's a fantastic 2.2% unemployment rate for accountants and that's well below basically any other field of study. Overall, there's a ton of speculation here and I could definitely see if you disagree with me on this, but I'm going to give it an 8.5%. Next, let's go ahead and talk about X factors. So I think one thing that's really amazing about business degrees in general is that you end up learning the language of money. Business degrees tend to teach you a lot about budgeting, saving, networking, investing, and leadership. And these are entrepreneurial skills that give them a very high chance of being financially successful in life. In fact, when you look up the statistics, you find that many millionaires do have business degrees. Out of all degrees, accounting is the sixth most likely to make you a millionaire and six out of the top 10 degrees that create the most millionaires are business related degrees. Now there is a counter argument to this of course, it could be that people who are financially successful tend to be attracted to degrees that have to do with business and money and it really wouldn't have mattered what degree they would have gotten, they would have been financially successful anyways. Nobody knows for sure, but what you can say for sure is that learning the basics of personal finance and money management will likely lead to you being financially successful. Accounting is also a very flexible career that could lead to you either being an entrepreneur or maybe moving into a high level position in a business. Think about it, even if you're just a small business accountant, doing the taxes for all these different types of businesses will tell you which ones are thriving and which ones are struggling. This would more or less give you insider information on which industries you should invest in or maybe which industries you should take out a business loan on and get into. I think this is one of the big reasons why you see so many millionaire accountants. Still there is that risk of automation or outsourcing and I think this is probably a little worse for accounting than a lot of the other business degrees, but overall pretty much all business degrees rank high when it comes to x factors and that's because they're so flexible in all the different options that you have. You can work in a bunch of different industries, you can go a lot of different paths whichever way you want, you're not really stuck in any one thing. So overall I'm going to give accounting a nine when it comes to x factors. So I'm going to quickly summarize the pros and the cons of going into accounting. So the pros is that it's very flexible, there's lots of opportunity, there's good pay especially later on in the career. There's a decent job outlook for the future and it's a stable career where there'll be jobs basically anywhere that you move. The cons here is that it's very tedious work, there's lots of number crunching, there's a possibility that it might be outsourced or automated in the future. The pay is a bit low compared to some of the other business degrees when you first start and there's not as much human interaction and I guess this could be a pro or a con depending on your personality. So the overall score is going to be 8.375 which is really solid. Check out my other videos right here, I made them just for you. Go ahead, smash the like button, hit the subscribe button, ring the notification bell and then comment down below any ideas that you have on the video or any other comments. Thank you so much for watching and bye for now.