98% of accountants say they love their work, citing problem-solving, career stability and meaningful impact as main reasons.

– Progress Software

Svetlana Gadzhieva

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIF.

This year marks Svetlana’s second as financial operations manager for Connor Group in San Francisco. Her career path—from external audit manager at some of the largest public companies to Sarbanes-Oxley and IPO advisory—shows “how a strong technical foundation opens doors you never originally anticipated,” she says. Her work enables organizations to navigate complex financial landscapes with clarity and confidence.

In the evenings, she writes a short-list of priorities for the next morning. “Without it,” she says, “the next day loses its focus.”

What does a typical day look like for you?

Every day starts with a choice: you either manage your energy or it manages you. I learned early on that without proper sleep, eight to nine hours, even the most structured day starts to crack. I give my mornings the most demanding tasks, the ones where the cost of error is highest. I work with multi-billion-dollar organizations whose financial processes affect not just the U.S. economy, but global markets. In that context, a gap in the control environment isn’t just an auditor’s finding. It’s a risk to investors, to regulators and ultimately to market confidence.

What keeps you coming back to your work?

The importance of the decisions and the people around me. In a single day I might dive into the procurement system architecture of one client, understanding why they chose a solution and how they built manual controls around it, then switch to clients working on SOX requirements or IPO readiness. And when you work alongside people who put ethics and expertise above quick wins, and who openly share what they know, you grow differently. Faster and deeper.

What should people know about accounting?

Accounting spans tax, forensics, audit, FP&A (financial planning and analysis), SOX, IPO consulting and financial technology. People who started as associates at regional firms are now CFOs, sitting on boards of public companies or running their own businesses. What separates good professionals from exceptional ones is something no spreadsheet teaches you: the ability to make complex things understood. The accountant who can hold the room of engineers, lawyers, operations leads and CEOs, translates financial reality into language each person uses and moves everyone toward a decision, that person becomes indispensable. With AI, this is even clearer. A whole new class of specialists is now building financial AI agents and automated solutions, and without deep accounting expertise, these systems simply cannot be designed correctly.

What do you hope for the future of the CPA profession?

The CPA license is above all a mark of trust. Technology has always reshaped the profession: paper to computer, computer to Excel, Excel to the cloud, and now to AI. Each wave didn’t push accountants out; it made them more essential at the points where judgment matters more than calculation. Markets function because investors trust financial reporting. That trust is not built by algorithm, rather by people with professional training, whose reputations are on the line.

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