Glossary
How to Become an Accountant: What Reddit Gets Right (and Skips)
Becoming an accountant in Canada means finishing an accredited business or accounting degree, completing the CPA Professional Education Program (CPA PEP), and logging roughly 30 months of qualifying, supervised work experience before you sit the Common Final Examination. Most people land in the profession by around age 24 to 27, not by some fixed deadline. At Treewalk, we hire and train CPA candidates every year, so we see the gap between what Reddit threads say and what the path actually feels like from the inside.
Reddit is a decent place to vent and a mediocre place to plan a career. Threads on r/Accounting and r/CPA are full of real, useful venting about busy season and bad managers, mixed with survivorship bias about pay and burnout stories that skip the context. Here is the version we tell candidates directly.
What the actual path looks like
There is no shortcut around three requirements:
Education.
A bachelor’s degree with the accounting and business prerequisites CPA Canada requires, or a graduate diploma if your undergrad didn’t cover them.
CPA PEP.
A part-time, employer-supported program you complete while working, ending in the Common Final Examination.
Practical experience.
About 30 months of qualifying work, usually inside a firm or an approved employer, under a CPA mentor.
Is 25 too late to become an accountant?
No. Most people don’t dream of becoming an accountant at 18. Nobody dreams of becoming an accountant: it’s a profession people stumble into, and finding meaning along the way matters more than when you started. A lot of our own students arrived after a first career, a business degree they weren’t sure what to do with, or a layoff that forced a reset. Firms don’t penalize a later start. They care whether you’ll finish PEP and put in the work, not what you were doing at 22.
How long will it take to become an accountant?
Realistically, 5 to 6 years from the start of your degree to your CPA designation: roughly 4 years of undergrad, then 2 to 3 years running PEP and your practical experience hours in parallel. People who enter with a completed degree and go straight into an accounting role can finish the CPA portion in about 2.5 to 3 years. There is no way to compress the experience-hour requirement. It exists because the judgment CPAs are trusted for only comes from doing the work under supervision, not from passing exams alone.
Can you make $100,000 as an accountant?
Yes, and for most CPAs it’s a matter of when, not if. Six figures is a realistic outcome within several years of getting your designation, sooner in high-demand areas like transaction advisory, controllership, or public company reporting. It is not a first-year number, and anyone telling you it is hasn’t worked in a firm.
Can you make $500,000 a year as an accountant?
For a small number of people, yes, but almost never as a straight employee doing compliance work. That kind of income shows up for partners with equity in a firm, for CFOs at scale, or for people who eventually start their own practice. Treat any Reddit thread quoting a $500,000 salary as an outlier, not a plan.
What Reddit doesn’t tell you
The biggest variable in how this profession feels isn’t the CPA exam. It’s who you work for during those 30 months. Firms differ wildly on hours, mentorship, and whether junior staff are treated as capacity to burn or people to develop.
One thing candidates never ask about, and should: what happens to your file when a partner realizes you’re not the right fit. At most firms, a mis-hire just gets quietly reassigned around, and it takes far too long for anyone to say so out loud.
We built Treewalk around the opposite instinct. We’re remote by conviction, not convenience, because professionals with judgment can decide where they do their best work. We don’t run annual performance reviews or a formal HR department at 75+ staff, because when you hire carefully and don’t tolerate bad behavior, you don’t need the machinery. Several of our current CPAs started as students here and passed their exams while working real client files, not busywork. That’s the difference a Reddit thread can’t capture: not whether the designation is hard (it is), but whether the place you get it treats you like someone worth developing.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need an accounting degree specifically, or just any business degree?
You need the accounting and business prerequisite courses CPA Canada sets, which some business degrees cover directly and others require topping up with a post-degree diploma. Check your transcript against the current prerequisite list before applying to PEP.
Can I do the CPA program while working full time?
Yes, that’s how most candidates do it. CPA PEP is designed to run alongside a qualifying job, which is also how you accumulate your practical experience hours.
Is public practice or industry a better place to start?
Public practice, meaning firms like Treewalk, gives broader exposure across clients and industries in a shorter time. Roughly 70% of people who train in firms eventually move into industry roles, so starting in a firm keeps that door open either way.
Does switching firms during PEP hurt my progress?
It can slow you down administratively, since your new employer needs to confirm your experience hours qualify, but it doesn’t reset the clock on completed hours. It’s worth doing once for the right fit, not repeatedly.
What actually separates a good training firm from a bad one?
Whether junior staff get real client exposure early, whether there’s a mentor actually checking in, and whether the firm’s capacity is managed so people aren’t burning out before they finish PEP. Ask current students these questions directly in interviews.
Where to next
If you’re evaluating firms to start or finish your CPA experience hours, our careers page walks through how we structure student training, mentorship, and the CPA PEP timeline at Treewalk. You can also reach our team directly at diane.janzen@treewalk.com to ask what a student role here actually looks like.
