The Leinster Society of Chartered Accountants has recently published its 2005 salary survey which was compiled on their behalf by The Accountants Panel. This article looks at the employment market for chartered accountants and sees how this ties in with the results of the salary survey.
NEWLY QUALIFIED MARKET
As always, there is a huge demand for newly qualified chartered accountants. Financial services and industry clients are snapping them up as soon as they qualify. They are getting starting packages of €45,000 to €55,000. This is around 10% higher than this time last year. There is a particularly strong demand for newly qualifiers for the compliance and internal audit sectors of the market.
This is creating huge problems for practising firms who are losing qualified staff at a time when they are already very busy with more work through the additional compliance and regulatory requirements of their clients. The problems filter down through the market with Big 4 firms taking staff from the next tier and then next tier taking them from the smaller firms. Salaries of up to €50,000 and occasionally a bit more are being offered to tempt newly qualifiers.
Interestingly, the rise in salaries for newly qualifiers has not been matched by the rises for experienced accountants and so the differentials between staff have been eroded.
FINANCIAL CONTROLLER / FINANCE DIRECTOR
The figures in the salary survey show that salaries at the more senior level didn't rise very much between January 2004 and January 2005. This is consistent with our own experience of the market. There were not that many new vacancies created and there is a good supply of senior experienced accountants. Part of the reason for the lack of positions is that when a financial controller leaves, they are being replaced by promoting someone from within. This effectively creates a vacancy at the newly qualified level rather than at the senior level. But we have found that so far in 2005, there has been a lot more movement in the market with some pick up in demand for senior accountants. Salaries are beginning to rise again. But clients usually have a selection of good applicants and often look for and get sector-specific experience.
TAX MARKET
Financial services companies in particular are actively recruiting manager and director level tax people from practice. There is particular demand for specialists in VAT and international tax planning. But the practices are fighting back aggressively, offering higher salaries in an effort to keep these scarce skills.In contrast to the newly qualified accountant trained in audit, those trained in tax are finding it much more difficult to get positions in financial services or industry. The supply of tax people at these levels exceeds the demand.
WOMEN
Anecdotally, women are paid the same as men for doing the same jobs. However, there seems to be much fewer women in senior positions than men. A higher percentage of women work in the not-for-profit sector which is lower paying than the business sector. As a result, the average salaries are lower. This is probably no different from any other industry. Where women do make it through to the more senior positions, they are paid as well as men.
PART-TIME
Every year, we get a hand-full of responses from accountants working part-time. These are not included in the survey. This year, we got 22 responses from part-time employees, all of whom were women. So it seems that the general society trend to family friendly flexible working arrangements is helping women working in accountancy.
In our experience most of these part-time positions evolved from full-time positions. Women who had worked for a company for a few years applied to reduce from full-time to part-time. We are rarely asked to recruit for newly created part-time positions and we always have around 10 candidates who want to move from full-time to part-time, whose employer can't accommodate them.
DUBLIN SALARIES VS REST OF COUNTRY
The salary survey is restricted to the Leinster area and so does not provide comparative figures for outside Dublin and the Leinster area. In our experience jobs at the same level are paid the same salaries in the major cities - especially Dublin and Cork. Two factors depress the salary levels outside these areas. Firstly, the companies tend to be smaller and so the packages are generally smaller. In addition, there are many accountants who want to move from the cities and so are prepared to work for less. If pushed to put a figure on it, we would say that the premium for working in Dublin would be around 5% to 10%
Taking the most directly comparable sector of the market, newly qualified accountants outside Dublin are getting paid around €40,000 compared to €45,000 to €55,000 in Dublin.
OLDER CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS
Despite the moves against age discrimination, older accountants are still finding it difficult to find employment at a suitable level. Older probably means around 40+. Because there are virtually no newly qualified accountants available for temporary assignments, clients are often filling these positions with accountants who have more experience than is necessary. And because the older accountants are having difficulty in getting permanent jobs, they are often prepared to work in more junior jobs than they had before.
Older chartered accountants outside Dublin often face long periods of unemployment. In Dublin at least, they can find temporary work. This is something which people should consider when making the move out of Dublin. If the position does not work out, it may be difficult to find a new job.
FRINGE BENEFITS
Over the ten years we have been doing this survey, the percentages of accountants getting fringe benefits at the different levels have remained remarkably constant. Most get their Institute Subscription paid for and most have a pension scheme. Just over half get VHI or BUPA.
But there has been a dramatic decrease in the prevalence of company cars. Back in 2000, 37% of all chartered accountants had company cars. This has reduced to 17% in a few short years. It seems that the changes in the tax treatment of company cars are encouraging more employers to provide car allowances instead.
When equity markets started crashing in 2001, share options lost most of their value and tended to be ignored by applicants when considering salary packages. With the recovery in equity markets, candidates are asking again for them. We also find that candidates are becoming more pension conscious, influenced no doubt by all the talk of a pensions crisis.
Tables have been omitted from the online version of this article.
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