In a competitive marketplace, most transactions end up somewhere near the middle. If you know a lot of people who hire or sell, and so do I, but we all know different people, and there are an equal number of buyers and sellers in each group, we might guess that we’d both be offered jobs around the middle wage for our skill set.
But if you and I both know some of the same people—and especially if those people occupy some kind of social or professional niche that makes them particularly valuable as references—then those connections could tip some transactions toward us even if we’re less skilled than the people we’re competing with.
If job A pays $100,000 and job B pays $90,000 but comes with better connections, was it worth taking job B? It depends on what you think your connections are worth. But it’s worth thinking about; if you had more money than someone else with the same skill set, but they had better connections than you did, they could end up with a better deal.
Some jobs are more about who you know than what you know. This is not always bad. Sometimes knowing the right people can get you access to opportunities, information, and resources that other people don’t have.
The problem is that it makes it easier for other people to get jobs even if they don’t know as much or work as hard as you do. And sometimes jobs depend on who you know even if you are both equally qualified. For example, getting a job at a company often requires an “in.” You need someone to take your resume seriously which means knowing someone within the company who will vouch for you.
This distortion can be especially pernicious when it is applied to political power. The problem is that the powerful get to decide who has access to power and influence. And because powerful people want to help their friends, they end up creating large groups of people with no real political power but plenty of political connections — like Washington insiders or Silicon Valley investors.
Where you work and who you know do influence your access to opportunities. You can be qualified for a job and not get it because of this factor.
If you want to advance in your career and/or move up in the social hierarchy, it is not enough just to have skills. You also need to develop relationships with people who can help you move ahead or upward. This is especially true if you are not already at the top; otherwise, your networking opportunities will be limited.
Because most people don’t like to admit this, they often make excuses for why they haven’t advanced as far as they’d like: they say that their boss doesn’t recognize their talent or that their company doesn’t encourage promotion from within. But we all know that isn’t always true, and we sometimes even acknowledge it among ourselves: “Yeah, my boss is a total idiot, but what am I going to do?” As one of my friends likes to say, “It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission.”
In fact, if given a choice between taking credit for something good and pointing the finger at someone else for something bad, most people will choose the latter—even when acknowledging someone else’s contribution would be much more effective in advancing their careers.
If you want to get a job in an accounting firm, it is not the only thing that matters. It is also important who you know.
If you were applying for a job at Deloitte or KPMG, the firm might decide between two equally qualified candidates by flipping a coin, but more likely they will choose the candidate with better connections.
The fact that it’s not just what you know but also who you know is a well-known phenomenon of the job market. Your career prospects depend not only on what you can do, but also on your social connections. The more people you know, and the more important those people are, the better your job prospects.
The importance of who you know is so obvious that everyone knows it. But if everyone knows it, why does anyone ever say “it’s what you know” instead?
The answer is: because they’re both true. It is not just what you know and it is not just who you know. They both matter, and they matter in different ways for different jobs.
In a way, it’s a numbers game. If you have a good education and if the people who know the most about you — your teachers, your college — happen to be well connected, then you will probably get a job in accounting if you want one.
But connections are not just what they say on “The Sopranos.” They’re not always obvious.
In practice, the best connections are often between people who don’t even know each other, or at least didn’t know each other well at the time they made the connection. What matters is that their friends were friends. If your sister goes out with someone from Brown who knows another Brown graduate at KPMG in New York, and if you apply to KPMG in New York, then it’s likely that someone will at least give you an interview.
That’s how things work in the real world. And if you want to understand how things work in the real world, it helps to know about this kind of thing early on — not just so you can do it yourself but so you can detect it when someone else does it to you.
Accounting is a very broad field. There are many different types of accountants with varying levels of responsibility. Some accountants might be in the bookkeeping department of a company while others might be in charge of maintaining the financial records of a large corporation. The nature of financial records and how they are maintained will differ depending on the size and type of business that they are being used to keep track of. Accountants can also specialize in certain areas where expertise is needed, such as tax accountants, forensic accountants, or healthcare-related accountants.
Accountants can work at all different kinds of companies, from small family-owned businesses to large corporations. Accountants provide important services to the businesses that hire them, ensuring that the organizations’ financial information is complete and correct. They can advise management about how to save money by making better use of resources or how to invest money in profitable ways.
Accounting is a career that can have an enormous impact on a business because companies depend on accounting professionals to keep them running effectively and legally. Accountants ensure that the finances are accurately recorded so that other people in management positions can make informed decisions about product development, manufacturing processes, staffing needs, marketing strategies, and more.