Advice for a Successful Career in the Accounting Profession

CHAPTER SEVENCore Values Every Accountant Should Embrace

Key Takeaway

Certain core values are essential to your success as a professional accountant. It is critically important to understand this and commit to embracing behaviors that will build trust, credibility and respect.

Accounting is a profession, just like law or medicine. Let’s look at what that means by reviewing the six characteristics of a profession²¹ summarized below:

• Renders a specialized service based upon advanced knowledge and skills.
• Involves a confidential relationship between a practitioner and a client or an employer.
• Is charged with a substantial degree of public obligation.
• Requires a common body of knowledge to be mastered by acquiring and demonstrating specific skills.
• Serves the public interest.
• Is bound by a code of ethics governing its relationships with clients, colleagues and the public.

Successful accountants recognize their status as members of a profession and embrace the responsibilities that come with that status. But what does it really mean to be a professional? Here is how the dictionary defines a professional (my source for this and the definitions that follow in this chapter was the Merriam‐Webster Dictionary):

Professional—Engaged in one of the learned professions; characterized or conforming to technical or ethical standards of a profession; exhibiting a courteous, conscientious, ...