#12 Training
Jan 30th, 2009 by pfi
Training is important to accountants, but not for the reasons typically listed. Keeping up to date on the latest accounting standards, improving soft skills, utilizing new software – nobody cares. All the real learning is done on the job anyways.
Trainings are the perfect time to see coworkers, go out, and not sleep. People go to restaurants, bars, clubs, shopping centers, and do whatever as long as it doesn’t involve studying classroom materials. Accountants need to celebrate getting through a day of boring courses with copious amounts of alcohol.
When accountants need to travel for a two week training session, it is acknowledged by everyone that those two weeks will be filled with sleep deprivation, coffee, and alcohol. Accountants become so sleep deprived at training that it is a miracle they can stay awake at all during the actual training parts.
When would be a good time to schedule mandatory trainings? Popular solutions in practice have been during busy season, two days before the filing deadline, or summertime.
Trainings vary of course and can be for any purpose. Many trainings help fulfill CPE and others are just as good time wasters. There are accountants who spend most of their time attending trainings and teaching them to others.
As boring and useless as training really is (since accountants learn by doing), training is the perfect opportunity to catch up with coworkers and get completely trashed.
That is great! I love CPE, I tend to get zero sleep and have a blast. You haven’t partied until you have partied with Accountants.
I went from corporate (for 5 months) to public (for a little over a year). At my corporation, I received excellent training that I considered to be very valuable and essential to my position. My public firm gave me absolutely no training and expected me to walk in the door – relatively fresh out of college with no public experience – and automatically know everything, and in fact treated me like I was stupid if I couldn’t figure something out after looking at it for 5 min.
I think one of the partners who earned her accounting degree from the same university felt threatened when she found out how much higher my GPA was than hers.
You know what I really love…. interns/juniors to foot and fax.
So true. Training is full of extra curricular mayhem. I know a guy who woke out of a drunken sleep walking experience in the hallway outside of his room, in his underwear with no key. He had to go down and get a key from the front desk. They busted his chops for identification.
Let’s hear it for Orlando. (Oh-yeah.)
C’mon – who’s gotten a little wild in the warm weather?
Was that the Caribe Royale in Orlando?
Is that the Caribe Royale? The site of a druken training for many Big 4 auditors.
I think all the big four should have training at the Caribe Royale at the SAME time. We’ll call it networking, then see what the clients do when we are all “out of the office without access to voicemail or email” and there is noone there to remind them that their trialbalance does in fact have to sum to zero.
I like it. “Networking”
See you there this August!
Then again- there is always lovely Grapevine, Texas.
Yeeee-Hawwww!
There ain’t nothin quite like being cooped up in the Embassy Suites for two weeks straight with +500 horny, thirsty first-years studying “tax” all night long!
Qcenter baby. Free drinks and your own private room. Makes “networking” easier than Houston and Stone Mountain.
Ahhh… yes…. fond memories of the Qcenter. Having your own private room was the best. For a moment I think I might have recalled meeting you during “networking” session, — but my memory is a little fuzzy thanks to all thoes free drinks!
[…] good example of perk abuse is training. Locked into training rooms all day, accountants binge on coffee, mineral water, and themed snacks […]
What has made me most sick about public accounting is the spotty training that seniors provide to their new staff. It’s quite common for a senior to dump work on the associate and not explain any of it. Then the senior is in utter shock and disbelief when the associate cannot complete the assignment or does not understand what is going on.
HELLO! This is probably our first time looking over the material and we likely never covered this in school.
Shame on all your HORRIBLE Senior Associates.
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I love it! Back in my big 4 days most of my colleagues treated training like a trip to Vegas: free-flowing booze, ill-advised hookups, and the like. I remember one partner-manager training where the marketing girls had a party in their rent house at the resort every night, and the partners were the wildest ones. The lead partner of our group suggested a toga party (partially fueled by alcohol, partly from his pervish desire to see one of the well-endowed marketing girls in nothing but a bedsheet) and shocked everyone by showing up to the next night’s party in a togo (everyone else assumed he was kidding). Of course several people went and pulled sheets off the bed of the rent house to try and fit in, including the well-endowed marketing girl, although she was left a bit exposed since she apparently didn’t know how to secure her toga.
What happens in training stays in training! Thanks for inspring the flashback.
[…] at work early the next day. This post-hangover productivity is well practiced by accountants during annual training where they stay out all night and sit in all […]
Love the Q Center. Trapped in the middle of nowhere… you could attempt to venture into town, but why when you have the Cue Pub to go to for all your drinking needs – of course at NY prices… Then you always have your private room to follow it up. I could complain about the small beds…. but all the better to get cosy in.
I’m not easily impressed. . . but that’s iprmesnsig me!
Make sure that you set goals so that you can have a benchmark to reach every week, month and year. This will allow you to form the discipline that is needed for quality investing and successful financial management. If you hit your goals, set them higher in the next timeframe that you choose.
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