This may not be the appropriate place for a post such as this, but hopefully someone wiser than me can lend some sage advice. I am looking for a new direction in my life after leaving my engineering job of 20+ years. Having had a long term interest in accounting and bookkeeping, I started courses on AccountingCoach.com and began courses for Quickbooks Online certification. Ideally, I would like to work with a few smaller businesses to get them set up with using QBO and be responsible for monthly bookkeeping tasks. I do not have any job experience in this field, so I am a little stuck with how to proceed to make myself more hireable. I have looked into a couple community college courses for bookkeeping certificates as well as a few masters of accounting for non-accounting majors programs, but given the cost of these options, I really need to make sure I am going down the right path. I don't think at this point in my life that I really want to go the CPA route, but I suppose it could be a possibility if I want more from this. I also had the idea of approaching a few local CPAs to see if they would take me on to perform menial data entry in exchange for further training, but don't really have the confidence to approach anyone given my lack of experience.

Any advice on how to proceed in my situation would be appreciated.

Every CPA I know is begging for people to come work.

I'd reach out to a few and see if you get any bites. Post where you are located and someone might push you in the right direction.

Thanks for the reply. I am located in Seattle.

You may want to join a local chapter of AICPA (or WSCPA in your area) and then attend meetings.

If you are wanting to work remotely more, then look into being one of the online assistants for Quickbooks or similar. No idea of what they look for in background, education, experience, etc.

Good luck.

Thanks! That's a good idea about joining a local industry chapter. Hopefully these kind of meetups will start occurring again as we continue to open things up post-covid. I looked into the QuickBooks assistant position, and it appears they want 3 years of experience. That's not a bad role to shoot for after I gain some experience elsewhere. I would like to be mostly remote.