prncess674

if you have experience in the operations of the tax department. I do risk management, technology assessments and process improvement as it relates to the tax department. We tried hiring general consultants but quickly found that US tax laws are so complex that you need to have an in depth knowledge of US Tax law to be effective in this job. It's definitly a niche market but definitly in demand.

boilermaker

I do my own income taxes (the old way - no software ). Does that count?

Kiwi Flyer

dont mean to offend but you couldnt pay me enough for a job in tax area

prncess674

I don't know cr*p about individual taxes. I use TurboTax to do my personal taxes. Now if you want to know about setting up a data warehouse for a multi-national corporation's tax department then I have loads of useless information. :P

boilermaker

I find useless information highly entertaining

shazbot

I graduated in May, w/ a Finance + IT/IS B.S. Got a job as a consultant, and relo'd from east coast out to CA. The current project is based out of where i live, so I don't travel, but I did get to go up to Alaska for a week on the company dime a few months ago. Gona try & get on a travel project mid-june or so hopefully. At any rate, everyone tells me that travel is fun for awhile, then it gets old.

The one thing as a consultant however, is that you've gota be willing to put in the long hours. I've been doing 10-12 hour days straight for the past few months, and working on the weekends sometimes. The cool part is that most of the people here are travelers, so they all leave thursdays, and theres no need to come in to the client site on fridays, so i just work from home.

bocaEXP

I travel mostly as a "commuter" these days spending a week in my office and a week in my home office, plus side trips for clients and conferences.

As for consulting, it is very taxing at times. Depending on that specialty you may spend all your time in Manhattan living it up on per diem and living in a swany corp apt or time square hotel.

OR

You can also get stuck for 6 months in places like Bridgewater, NJ where everything closes at 9pm and you are flying out on the 7pm EWR flight on friday night being "20th in line for take off". Jersey is filled with rich companies (many drug companies) that love to take on consultants!
most of them are to far out of the way for many trips to NYC.

I spent many a winters "livining" in Miami, but hiking it up to the NorthEast for weekly.

shazbot

yea, travelings the luck of the draw. you can be put up in a great place like LA, or you can get stuck in the middle of nowhere. When i was up in Alaska, some of the ppl have been travelling there for close to a year, and this was in a town of about 1-2,000 people, and gets like 2 hours of daylight during winter.

I didn't mind it for a week, but I couldn't imagine a year of that...

rbrenton88

I have recently begun commuting from NY to Greece on a bi-weekly basis (1 week in each place). As you can imagine, this gets old really, really fast.

The day someone invents a teleporter will be the finest day in human history...at least for me.

I should mention that economy flights are required.

ilalum89

Travel isn't always glamourous.

I spent the first four years with my company travelling to such exotic locales as Hattiesburg, MS, Detroit, MI and Linden, NJ. All I did was gain 25 lbs eating fast food while I sat in my hotel room working at night. Oh yeah - I didn't get to keep the Frequent Flyer miles back then - they went back to the company so our execs could fly first class.

My first International trip was to Tokyo Japan - All I saw of Tokyo was from all 4 conference rooms windows on the 33rd floor of a building in Shinjuku.

Most of the time I was on the road alone but sometimes I got to travel with others. The best part of travelling was when I was with other people who were fun - there were more than a few trips to New Orleans from MS that lasted all night.

Martinis at 8

Coathanger,

Since you are in Oz, I take it your preference is to be more on the international circuit, than on the domestic circuit in Oz. I run into quite a bit of Aussies in SE Asia that work for various banks, oil companies, etc. You may want to canvass a few banks like HSBC and similar, that have ops globally and in your part of the world specifically [like SE Asia]. Local to where you are, I know that BHP Billiton has international assignments for finance types.

Lots of opinions and advice on this thread. All of which are probably valid for the individual cases of the respective posters. When the search engine gets reactivated, you will see that the topic has been discussed at length here at FT.

If you join a company and then get enough quality experience to go off on your own, then you will be able to dictate your travel options better. By options I mean deciding the hotel, airline, and "loiter" time to take advantage of leisure opportunites at your travel destination. This would also include which markets you wish to serve, and in which part of the world. Typically when I travel, I will add loiter days to the gig, and take these loiter days either before or after the gig.

As an example for Oz [Melbourne], I have timed engagements there to coincide with both the F1 Race and the Australian Open. Other regionally "timed" gigs have allowed me to catch an F1 in Malaysia, leisure stopovers in Singapore, Thailand, Cambodia, etc. I do Paris stopovers in/out of Africa to/from the US, and am trying to engineer a gig that will put me back in France in late May so I can catch the Monaco F1 for '05. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Have fun in school while you are still there.

M8

GWU ESIA STUDENT

Ouch.

Canarsie

That will not be a problem as I have already performed a Search for everybody who is interested. There is no need to use the FlyerTalk Search engine or wait until it is enabled once again.

Just click here for other threads on this topic...

Martinis at 8

Nicely done!

M8

CountinPlaces

You said that you had a degree in finance so you should consider being an auditor. Our internal auditors are travelling constantly. You just need a company that lets you travel wherever you want instead of coming home for the weekend as long as the cost is the same.

I have seen many places like that, though I am no road warrior. I just make the most of my business trips.