What careers can you get into with a postgraduate accounting and finance degree?

Accounting and Finance are both areas of study that can open up many career doors for those graduating from postgraduate degrees.

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Here at Birmingham City University, we offer a wide range of postgraduate accounting and finance courses:

These courses lend themselves to a wide variety of future careers, opening up the world of finance, investment, accounting and banking to graduates. You don’t even need to have studied accounting before – our MSc Accounting and Financial Management degree is open to graduates from other academic backgrounds.

Here are just some of the careers you could move into after graduating from our postgraduate finance and accounting degrees.

Auditing and Assurance

Auditing is becoming more and more commonplace in modern business, as it becomes increasingly important that big companies are externally examined to make sure they are running in compliance with the law.

Auditors from an accounting or finance background will be concerned with checking through a company’s finances, ensuring they are correct and in line with legal requirements. There are also independent auditing firms that companies can use to simply check they are running as smoothly and as efficiently as possible.

Cost Accountant

Have you ever wondered exactly how much a certain product or service cost to create and produce? That is what a cost accountant looks into!

Cost accountants try to figure out exactly what a proposed product or service is going to cost, taking into account all of the attached expenses. Making a new food product isn’t just about the cost of manufacturing – there is also research, taste testing, focus groups, marketing and amenities like water and electricity to take into account. Therefore, a cost accountant aims to give the bottom line of any venture so a company can decide if the venture is worth the risk.

Financial Manager

In large companies, a financial manager will oversee all of the financial decisions their business undertakes. This can range from investments and acquisitions to company expansion. They work within a team that looks to analyse all available data to make sound recommendations about how best to drive the company forward.

In smaller companies, this role may also extend to overseeing all money matters, including accounting and payroll. Either role calls for someone who is great at multi-tasking and working across several different sectors in order to succeed, both on a personal and professional level.

Investment Analyst

As our world gets ever more interconnected, society is producing higher and higher volumes of data. This is particularly true in the financial world, with every major financial event having ripple effects across the globe. Investment analysts are tasked with making sense of it all, and turning that knowledge into recommendations for their businesses.

Investment analysts take into account financial trends and information on all scales, from global markets to analysing individual companies. This in turn allows them to advise how best to make the most out of an investment. Investment analysts can either do this internally for big investment businesses, or as part as an independent investment analysis company. Whilst by no means an easy job, this is one career that can be highly rewarding for those that choose to pursue it.

Project Accountant

Where a cost accountant typically looks at all expenditure before anything is spent, a project accountant heads up all of the costing for an ongoing project, usually from start to finish. They are a vital part of any project’s delivery, as they make sure everything remains within budget before completion.

Typical responsibilities for a project accountant may involve managing billing and payroll, exploring unexpected costs that occur over the course of a project, preparing for external auditors, and having final say on any expenditures. As with most of the jobs listed here, you will find this role both internally and externally within businesses, with in-house project accountants moving from one project to the next within a company, while freelancers are brought in on a project-by-project basis.

And thanks to the wide range of skills our students acquire over their time here, many more career paths outside of traditional accounting and finance roles are opened up too. We have alumni across the country in a wide variety of roles, including everything from inventory managers to accounting software experts. Who knows where a postgraduate degree in accounting and finance from BCU could take you!