How I Stepped Outside My Comfort Zone and Grew in a Personalized Tax and Accounting Career Path

Are you looking for a job where you can learn and grow? A career where you have the flexibility to actually balance your work and life? 

If so, then you should consider a career as a tax, bookkeeping and financial expert at Intuit.  The expert career opportunities at Intuit are designed for talented individuals who want to define and create a personalized career and/or potentially uncover new ways to supplement their own business. 

Four top reasons to become a personalized expert at Intuit are to: 

1. Create your own personalized employment path to meet the needs of your life. 

2. Work in a company culture that fosters employee growth through training and credentialing. 

3. Join a large, diverse team of professionals using their expansive range of skills and experience to solve complex problems together.

4. Create valued connections with customers and fellow experts while tackling a wide variety of tax and accounting situations.

 To learn more about the opportunities available with Intuit, we reached out to Holly Wilk, a tax and bookkeeping expert who works across their TurboTax and QuickBooks products. 

In this interview, Wilk discusses her path at Intuit, the life of a tax and accounting expert, and how she is stepping outside her comfort zone. The following discussion has been slightly edited and reduced in length.   

My Career Journey. 

I've always worked in the customer service industry, even in high school. I started my current career journey when a girlfriend of mine said that she was going to start taking a tax class at our local tax prep office. We took the class together, and we ended up getting hired. I worked there for about nine years.  

My next step happened when my friend and former manager at the local tax office started working for Intuit as a TurboTax expert, and she suggested that I come work there as well.  I took her up on this offer and joined Intuit as a seasonal expert.

Then recently I was asked to be part of a pilot where I would get the opportunity to not only work on TurboTax Live chat, but I would also join a cross-product team for QuickBooks. It was really exciting to help test a new way of working and grow the business. Now being a tax and bookkeeping expert across products is a year round position!

How Intuit helps people (like me!) grow their careers. 

Intuit is a great place to start and grow your career. They offer a personalized employment path — across products, disciplines, seasonal vs. year-round , and more — to meet the needs of your life. 

Managers here are also very supportive and nurturing. They are open to letting their team try out new roles and projects to see if it's a direction they want to take — and they even help with getting necessary certifications.  

For example, just last year, I received my enrolled agent (EA) credential with Intuit’s support. I enrolled in Intuit’s EA Credential Assistance Program, which gave me access to online study materials from Fast Forward Academy and financial assistance to cover the cost of testing. As an Intuit expert, the program didn’t cost me anything. I was also able to connect with mentors and other experts working towards their EA to get support with studying and taking EA exams.  

This is only one of the many career development opportunities and job personalization opportunities that Intuit provides for their tax and accounting experts. This commitment to advancing their experts results in a truly talented team. 

What it’s like working with a large, experienced and diverse team of experts. 

Specifically on my team, all of the tax and accounting experts are QuickBooks certified, have more than 10 years of experience in the tax and accounting industry, and have expansive credentials (including CPA, EA and JD). Some members also have experience working at big four firms. They're a very intelligent group of professionals with a range of skills and experiences in solving a variety of problems with varying complexities. Many of them work part-time at Intuit and supplement their own practice.  

It's nice because even though we all have certifications, we all have our own unique strengths. No one can be an expert in everything, so it’s nice to have teammates with a variety of talents that we all can tap into and learn from.   

A few of my favorite aspects of being an Intuit expert. 

Having worked at Intuit for a few years, I am now in a place where I’m able to pick the hours I want. I am a single mom, so being able to take my kids to school in the morning is awesome. I'm able to create my hours and schedule based on my needs for the kids; I absolutely love that flexibility.   

And then, during the tax season, we're open seven days a week. So I can choose to work all nights or weekends if I want — but I don't have to. The flexibility is absolutely amazing. Working from home is equally amazing. At first, it was a little difficult because I've always worked in an office with people. Occasionally, I miss those friendships in an office setting. But I don't miss the commute to work. In Michigan, we have all four seasons — in the winter, it's horrible. Despite working from home now, my team and I are still able to foster strong working relationships virtually.

Additionally, I’m proud of the opportunities I have to step outside my comfort zone. One example of this for me was going over to the QuickBooks Clean-up project, where we’re helping customers bring their financial books up to date and resolve any errors. While I had QuickBooks experience, this was definitely outside of my comfort zone; I had to host workshops, create presentations and then present them. In college, I barely passed my public speaking class! So that was a huge hurdle for me. And having the opportunity to create and host workshops isn’t just for QuickBooks — those opportunities are available on all of our projects.

The No. 1 reason to join Intuit. 

The learning opportunities are so vast. There are so many different directions you can go. At Intuit, the flexibility and the support has always been amazing. They want you to succeed and choose a path for success. They want you to be the best. So they offer you tools that  can make it happen.  

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