Stuck in revolving hire and lay-off (accounting)

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I'm seeing some signals that are really making me wonder if I should get the heck out of my degree field.

I majored in accounting, graduated at the end of 2006, and to make a long story short I had a seven year job in an audit field that really amounted to finding errors and then reverse-collecting (ie. calling credit departments for money they owed our clients back). I found out, once that dried up, that everyone wanted exact-match experience, I really wanted to get into general accounting somewhere and everyone wanted to know 'how many years of general accounting experience do you have?'.

I had to leave that job in August 2013, worked with Accountemps who didn't find anything for me till November, work actually delayed until December, and it was a contract that lasted me until late March. I got glowing reviews but still waited from that time until early June 2014 to find an accounts payable step-up position which did quickly land me in a trouble-shooting and research role. It was six months temp-to-hire and it looked great until the company's board flipped when I was two months into that assignment; they went from growing to liquidating as fast as they could. I was there about eight months when I knew for certain that I'd be a permanent temp, let me boss know that I wouldn't be able to stick around at the wages they were able to provide, and subsequently got laid off in early March. After waiting a few months with Robert Half I decided to start spreading my feelers, put something on Careerbuilder, and a recruiter offered me a position at a local firm for the pay I needed and it sounded like sure hire! It's also AP II again - downside, it's been a month and I'm getting the impression that a) they really won't have the work for me b) I've gotten no outward signs whatsoever that there's been any social problem (and my read of people is generally pretty decent - I'm something of a one-way-glass aspie where it's my lack of body language that causes the problems more so than my ability to read others) but I overheard, as much as I didn't want to eavesdrop, from a conversation with the recruiter that it was an issue with them.

What I'm starting to get the sense of is that corporations are doing such fast and loose changes with their staff, whether outsourcing, experimenting, etc.. that it seems like job security's gotten really crap in the public sector. I just wanted to double-check that with some people here to see if I'm just getting set up with the wrong companies on dumb luck or whether this really is the story. I may eventually be out of a job and, due to an aging car and no stable financing for that, out of one of those too. I'm really wondering if I've just had a bad run of luck or whether I need to jump ship and get the heck out of accounting. One possibility I considered a year or so back was studying for the first two actuarial exams and so I'm weighing my options - should I give accounting more of a chance or is it a place where bum luck and organizational musical-chairs makes ability irrelevant to job stability?

I've gotta chew on this one a bit more because I don't want to jump the gun in putting in all the effort to sit through the actuarial exams just to find out that it's the same crap or that it's another dead end in other ways. Let me know what you guys think and, if you're having much more positive experience with the accounting field let me know what part of it your in as I may want to look into changing my focus within the field.

If you have just been bouncing around since August 2013 it may be a bit early to totally abandon debits and credits. I see the economy as still recovering so there is hope that stable hiring will resume reasonably soon.

That said, there is no harm (other than hard effort ) in broadening skills into related areas. After several years in public accounting I went with a large company, and thereafter cross-trained into systems work. That led to a decade or so of doing IT in support of accounting organizations.

It seems the days of post-war corporate job security are not what they once were, but accounting is still a sought after skill. That said, in school I thought actuarial science sounded like a cool field. I don't know anything about its career prospects though.

I think the silver lining in all of this is that I'm gaining a broader list of accounting and imaging systems that I can say I know a bit about. Also at this point I am picking up pivot tables; they're absurdly easy and I don't understand at all why people ask in interviews if you have pivot-table experience, IMHO if a person can't figure out pivot tables it's a wonder they were able to obtain a four-year degree. It's not two weeks of training, closer to two hours, even twenty-minutes for someone who had extensive Access programming experience like I did in one of my last jobs with cross-tabs and the like.

But yeah, its tough for me to tell how much of this is companies realizing that they can outsource it all to Hewlett Packard in India (AP, IT, maybe even purchasing, definitely most of HR), how much of it is the job market, and how much of it is just people turning into fuzzy-thinking panickers who can't seem to keep much of anything in perspective - like turning someone away because they haven't used pivot tables before.

One of the things that worked well for me in maintaining a career was to find something at which I was better than my coworkers and then to exploit the hell out of it. Becoming the office go-to guy for something, no matter how mundane (e.g. pivot tables) bought me job security. In some job performance evaluations there may be a category for something like "Teamwork: Contributes to team success by actively sharing expertise with others. Is a sought-after resource within his/her field."

Who knows, maybe your ticket to success is in becoming Mr. Pivot Table.

Actuarial science is a better field (than accounting) for most aspies. You were probably already aware of that, or else you wouldn't be considering it.

If you plan to stay in accounting, then you're running into a personal branding issue. Diversified experience is good, but jumping around too much is going to make it hard in the future to market yourself as an expert at anything, and without management experience, you can't play the jack of all trades card.

I would suggest to hone in on an complex industry or specialization and make yourself the authority on it. CPA or CMA licenses tend to help, as well as industry specific credentials (ie. ACAMS, FINRA, etc for financial services). Further education can also move you up to a higher level of work (ie. to accounting system design, policy research, etc).

Good luck, and I hope you find the right job for you.