Should I go to uni?

[Waspy]

That kind of makes no sense "we prefer you, so we will pay you less", not how it works, our pay very quickly aligns with a graduate.

10 candidates. 3 have relevant degrees, 2 have irrelevant degrees, 2 have irrelevant experience, 3 have relevant experience. Who you gunna hire. Any employer in the land will take one of the experienced ones, as long as they are not an asshat in the interview.

Also contrary to popular belief time =/= money, in my opinion anyway.

Sadly the "decide and it will fit" theory didn't work out too well the first time.

Don't get me wrong. Degrees have their place, and if I had an end goal in which a degree was either required or beneficial, then I would go and do it. What I won't do, is do a degree for the sake of it and just find myself three years down the in the same place. I don't know if you have looked up graduate unemployment recently, but it makes for pretty grim reading. My brother did a degree in his chosen field, graduated, and is now working in a supermarket to make ends meet. It's a story repeated way to often. Degree does not equal employment anymore. His mate, who skipped uni, went straight in and proved himself is now happy as larry, because he has more than a bit of paper to show he can do a job.

I'm not taking anyone's posts as negative, I'm grateful for everyone's input!

[Simeon]

Speaking to the decision makers at my firm, they have said they hugely prefer school leavers (those without degrees) to graduates, because they can be trained exactly how they want, are typically more driven (in their experience), and the degree adds no value to the roll. And that's coming from one of the top accounting firms globally.

Sorry mate, that's bollocks. Dunno which of the big four you work for, but I work at kpmg and they have big problems with the school leaver programme as so many are not prepared for the work, both academic and professional. Anyway, it's irrelevant for you now as you no longer fall in a school leaver bracket.

I completely empathise with your predicament as I also quickly found that I hate accounting and couldn't quit without paying back the fees, which I couldn't afford to do. However, I will say this, I battled on and got my ACA and it was a true character building experience.

It helps to focus you on what you really want to do (I'm the same as you now, I no longer believe any job is worth it as long as it pays well, it simply isn't!) and the beauty of an ACA is that it does open doors. Bare in mind that you will be about 23 when you qualify and you can then go and do other things, at home, abroad, pretty much where you want and in a huge number of roles. I've gone through this and I'm 29! All my managers were about 24..

However, if you want to move on into a field such as engineering then get yourself to uni, I agree that the value of a degree has fallen as you said earlier, but for a specialised field you need one.

My advice as someone who wanted nothing else but to quit (I suffered the verging on tears etc before going into work because I hated it so much) is to suck it up and stick at it, your future self will thank you for it for the opportunities you will have. I've landed a job in Corporate Finance Infrastructure (transport) now starting in September and I'm writing this post sat by a pool in Vietnam as I took a nice career break in the meantime.

There's more to accounting than accounting

[Waspy]

Sorry, I didn't even notice your reply!

Don't KPMG send their school leavers to uni anyway? Or they get a degree at least?

Thanks for the input, interesting to hear it from someone else who has done ACA. I know ACA is a massive key to a whole host of doors, I'm just not convicted any of those doors are right for me. And I'm not sure my mental health can handle three more years to open them either.

I'm currently planning on leaving in September and getting some bottom rung ledger clerk position, that really is 9-5 and that I can forget about when I get home of an evening. The thinking being that this should give me breathing space to think about what I want to do, while still paying the bills and not getting into training debt with my current employer.

Uni is still a serious contender though, more so that when I wrote the first post. I am just scared of making the wrong degree choice. Which is pretty out of character for me as usually I'm a "just do it" kind of guy. But I guess I am cautious as that attitude landed me in my current position.