Books for Big 4 Accountants
You will learn a lot when you join the big 4 or as you are working in the big 4, but there is a lot that you won’t learn and that you need to be able to teach yourself. That’s why we wanted to provide a list of recommended books for big 4 professionals. A list of books that we recommend is included below. Disclosure: the listing below includes affiliate links to Amazon.com.
Deloitte Yearbook – 2017 Year In Review
Are you wondering how to crack the Deloitte interview. Worry no more, you’ve come to the right place. The Deloitte 2017 Yearbook will help you nail your Deloitte interview.
Do you know that 500,000 people apply to Deloitte each year? No, well if you read all the news stories about Deloitte for the past year then you would have known that. Luckily you don’t have to read all the news stories about Deloitte for the past year because we’ve already done that for you in this book. Make sure to pick up your copy on Amazon today
Big 4 Interview Questions Book – 32 Questions and Answers
The most important part of the big 4 interview process is…confidence. How can you get confidence? You can gain access to the questions that you will be asked, and you can also learn how to answer those questions. Imagine walking into a big 4 interview and knowing the type of questions that you will be asked and how to answer them? Wouldn’t that feel amazing? That what the Big 4 Interview Questions book offers.
Blow the big 4 recruiters and big 4 partners that you interview with away with your confidence and knowledge after you read this book. We’ve made the questions in our interview book so thorough so that you won’t stumble on any questions on your big 4 interviews.
Deep Work
In order to perform great work at the big 4 you need to be able to focus. In today’s world, it is hard to stay focused. The book Deep Work will provide you with strategies to stay focused at work.
It is harder than ever to stay focused because of all of life’s distractions. In the big 4 some things that might distract you are frequent emails, social media, internet, listening to music at work and worthless meetings. If you can learn to perform deep work at the big 4, you will have a huge edge over other big 4 employees.
Learn Better
Learn better is a book that will help you master anything by enabling you to learn better as the title says. How can this apply to the big 4? Well one of the biggest ways I can think of is the CPA exam. Over 50% of the candidates fail their first CPA exam test. How can you prevent this? You can prevent this by being a better learner. Get your copy of Learn Better today to make sure that you pass the CPA on the first try. Learn better can also help experienced big 4 candidates become more technical. In order to grow in the big 4, you have to become more technical. Learn better can help anyone become more technical by enabling them learn subject matters faster and more efficiently.
The First 90 days
First off we recommend a book called The First 90 Days. If you haven’t joined the big 4 yet, but you will soon be joining or will be on a big 4 internship soon, this is a good book for you. This book is written by a Harvard professor on how to take advantage of the first 90 days of your job to make a lasting impression. You are vulnerable in those first 90 days because you probably don’t know the people and you don’t know all the ins and outs of the specific workplace. That’s why this book is good. It gives you a roadmap on how to succeed in those first few months of your job. This book teaches you how to promote yourself, how to learn a new role faster, and how to build a winning team. So again if you will be joining the big 4 soon make sure to check this book out.
Never Eat Alone
Next up is the book Never Eat Alone. This is a new classic on how to network in the workplace. Many of the people I know in the big 4 hate networking and hate creating client relationships. It is especially hard because accountants are introverted, but you can’t just give up. Half of the problem is that people think they will just figure it out without even learning how to do it. This book gives you some easy steps that you can take to establish relationships and foster them in your career so that you can reap the rewards later. Another reason this is a great book for big 4 accountants is that it was written by someone that worked at Deloitte. So again, if you have no idea how to network or create great client relationships in the big 4 make sure to check this book out.
Money Master the Game
The next book I recommend is Money Master the Game: the 7 simple steps to financial freedom. Everyone assumes that accountants know everything about personal finance, but they just don’t. Especially big 4 accountants because so much of what we do isn’t necessarily related to helping individuals. This book will help anyone learn what they should be doing with their personal finances and investments. I recommend reading this book early in your career so that you can get the full benefit of good investing for the rest of your career. It does through recommendations from the best investors in the world like Carl Icahn, Ray Dalio and Paul Tudor. You need to learn how to manage your finances now or you might be stuck being an accountant for longer than you’d like, and we’d all like to retire one day.
The Schmuck in My Office: How to deal effectively with Difficult People at work
The next book that I’m going to speak about is The Schmuck In My Office: how to deal effectively with difficult people at work. This book is good for big 4 accountants because you will no doubt face difficult people in the big 4. The big 4 attract all kinds of difficult people because of the nature of the work. You have to be willing to deal with anything since you are serving the client and you have to be willing to work any amount of hours. This means that the type of people that succeed at the big 4 are not necessarily that most mentally healthy people. Additionally, many of the people that succeed look out for themselves only and don’t care about team members. This book places difficult people in categories and provides brief strategies on how to deal with them. For example one of the categories that they use is narcissism, which I feel is very prevalent in the big 4. Again, you will have to learn how to deal with difficult people at the big 4, and this book will help you deal with that.
What’s Your Presentation Persona
At the big 4 it’s extremely important to have good presentation skills because so much of what the big 4 do nowadays is consulting and a big part of consulting is being able to present to clients and have great powerpoints. The book, What’s Your Presentation Persona ,helps you figure out what kind of presenter you are, and then it tells you your strengths and weaknesses and how to work on those strengths and weaknesses. After you figure out how to work on your strengths and weaknesses, it then goes into presentation best practices which I found extremely helpful. It also tells you how to make you powerpoint more interesting which I think it extremely important. Trust me, powerpoint in the big 4 is extremely important and if you can make them interesting you will do really well in the big 4. Go grab a copy of what’s your presentation persona today to work on your presentation skills and set yourself apart in the big 4.
The Mathematical Corporation: Where Machine Intelligence and Human Ingenuity Achieve the Impossible
The last book I will recommend today is also the most interesting to me. It’s about technology and all the possibilities of technology in corporate America. Since the big 4 are all about technology these days, I wanted to recommend a book to my listeners that will help them learn about the technology age and solutions out there. The next book I recommend is The Mathematical Corporation. This book is great because it talks about all the unique technologies coming and how they specifically will help large corporations. Since the big 4 are in the business of helping corporations, this book is a great solution for big 4 accountants and potential big 4 accountants. It helps you understand the benefit of data, analytics, machine learning and other solutions like natural language processing. This book is a great tool to help you learn and get ahead of other big 4 candidates and coworkers so go read this today. This book also makes an astonishing statement that accountants are jobs that will one day easily be replaced by machine intelligence so make sure to give it a read to learn how accountants will be replaced.
In conclusion we tried to provide a listing of books today that we think would be really helpful for your growth as a big 4 professional. Try to give some of them a read and see if you agree. Also make sure to share this page with a friend if you think they’d benefit from some of these books.
Blockchain for Dummies
The big 4 continue to invest in blockchain and blockchain solutions for their clients. Blockchain is a new technology out there that not many people know about. It is important for you to learn about it so that you don’t get left out of the blockchain revolution that is happening in the big 4.
Blockchain for dummies provides a great overview of what blockchain is, and it even provides insights into how you can build your own blockchain. To me, this is a must read for all big 4 accountants in the modern technological era.
Blockchain: Blueprint for a New Economy
This is another good book on Blockchain. Author Melanie Swan, Founder of the Institute for Blockchain Studies, goes into detail about blockchains potential future uses.
Topics include:
- Concepts, features, and functionality of Bitcoin and the blockchain
- Using the blockchain for automated tracking of all digital endeavors
- Enabling censorship? resistant organizational models
- Creating a decentralized digital repository to verify identity
- Possibility of cheaper, more efficient services traditionally provided by nations
- Blockchain for science: making better use of the data-mining network
- Personal health record storage, including access to one’s own genomic data
- Open access academic publishing on the blockchain