Career Counseling For Cpas: Personality Traits

A Certified Public Accountant can make great money, if he/she has the personality which excels as a
CPA. First, let's look at a few job postings:
CPA job postings as of 4/21/2010 include:
1.Controller, CPA Insurance industry specialist strong in SEC. $170k 2.SEC Reporting Manager,
promotable to Controller for biotech firm $130k 3.Accounting Manager. CPA needed for Fortune 500
client in San Francisco. $190k. What are the personality traits of CPAs? Are they different from
accountants? YES! As you may know, researchers and career counselors will study anything, or any
person if they will hold still long enough and so it is that researchers have studied the personality
traits of accountants and CPAs.
To career counselors, workers are divided into two very distinct, hardly ever overlapping sets of
personality traits: *The emotionally intuitive are fascinated by the world of emotions and tend to be
helpers. These people gravitate into careers as teachers, nurses, career counselors, nutritional
counselors, members of the clergy, and psychologists. *The emotionally devoid are drawn into
exactly the opposite types of jobs. They would rather live in a world exactly wrong and exactly right,
in which there is no ambiguity. They flourish within specifically delineated parameters and relish
clarity. They may either avoid emotions entirely or they will compartmentalize and intellectualize
emotions into neatly packed boxes. These people are detail-oriented, systematic and very organized.
Rarely do they react emotionally to any stimulus. These people gravitate towards careers in
mathematics, accounting, computer science, and scientific research, which reinforce their
organizational tendencies.
Carl Gustav Jung, the psychologist, saw the world of workers this way. He characterized an extrovert
as someone who was comfortable with interacting with a world of people, pets, and things while an
introvert was more comfortable exploring the world of ideas and concepts-which is where we would
find most accountants.
Jung did researchers a favor by categorizing people this way:
Sensing Intuitive Organize sequentially Top down view of broad concepts Organize abstract
concepts into a framework Like detail-oriented work Dislike detail-oriented work Thinking Feeling
Logical, objective decisions Value-based decision-making Subjective decision-making process
Consider how the decision will impact others
Researchers build on Jung's work by studying accounting students to see if they could correlate
success in a particular area of accounting with a specific personality type.
In Nourayi and Cherry's 1993 research, they found they could predict academic success for Sensing
individuals in a Tax, Auditing and Intermediate IT. It was clear that the Sensing students
outperformed their Intuitive classmates.
Building on Jung's work, the Myers-Briggs Types Indicators Personality Test divides the world into
16 categories of people. Myers-Briggs defines four squares, typified by Extrovert (E), Sensing (S),
Thinking (T), and Judging (J). As Myers-Briggs sees the world, everyone is a combination of these
different traits and each person is designated by the letters in order of their importance to that

person. According to Myers-Briggs, 6% of the population should neatly fall into each of the 16
personality grids. However, a phenomenal 25% of all accounting majors, according to Landry's 1996
study, fall into just one grid: ESTJ (Extrovert, Sensing, Thinking, and Judging)! This points to
personality traits held in common.
Accounting students, it turns out, are fairly easy to categorize. In 2006, Bealing's research team
corroborated Landry's findings by finding that 26.23% of the accounting majors they studied fell in
the ESTJ category on the Myers-Briggs and they found that over 75% of all accounting majors fell
into Jung's Sensing category because they organize data in a sequential manner!
The Federal government likes to categorize people as well. In 2002, the U.S. Department of the
Interior created a list of job titles paired up with the 16 grids on the Myers-Briggs. Under ESTJ, the
predominate personality trait set of accounting majors, these accounting job titles and others were
clustered: Auditor, Budget Analyst, and Credit Analyst.
Guess what? CPAs do not follow in the personality trait footsteps of their accounting brethren. In
fact, CPAs are quite different. Yes, accounting majors and accountants tend to be ESTJ but CPAs are
ISTJ: Introvert, Sensing, Thinking, Judging. This finding was confirmed in three separate studies
conducted 11 years apart: Kreiser et al., 1990, Shackleton 1980, and Jacoby 1981.
Is it possible that an ISTJ accounting major is more likely to become a CPA? Could being ISTJ be an
indicator of later success in becoming a CPA or earning a doctorate? YES! Several studies confirm
this.
In 1997, Wolk and Nikolai studied undergraduate accounting majors and confirmed that they were
predominantly ESTJ but accounting graduate students and faculty ---------Could it be that ISTJ accounting students are more likely to become a CPA? Wolk and Nikolai (1997)
found that while undergraduate accounting students were more likely to be ESTJ, accounting
graduate students and faculty (like CPAs) were more likely to be ISTJ. Many of faculty studied
became CPAs prior to earning their Ph.D. and entering the teaching field.
Keirsey.com (2003) delineated that ESTJ were the supervisor type and ISTJ were the inspector type.
This confirms that CPAs, who are ISTJ, possessed the inspector type of personality.
In Schloemer and Schloemer 1997's study, they found that 61% of CPA partners tended towards
intuition over sensing but only 20% of those at staff level do. Could that 20% of the staff become the
CPA partners of the future?
There's another difference between accountants and CPAs: CPAs command higher salaries and have
greater opportunities for upward mobility within an organization.
As an accountant, the career track which progresses upward at a faster rate is labeled "CPA." In
many firms, you hit the ceiling and progress no further if you do not become a CPA. Progressing
from being an accountant to becoming a CPA offers greater opportunities for promotion to
management and higher salaries.