@scared_cpa – In KY, experience doesn't have to be public – it can be public, private, government, IIRC even teaching accounting college courses can count with enough of it. I was licensed in 2012 with part-private and part-public, but just looked on cpa.ky.gov and the statutes are still the same:
Obtains one (1) year of accounting or attest experience while employed in an accounting or auditing position in public practice, academia, industry, or government that shall be verified by a certified public accountant who, during the time being verified, held an active license to practice from any state.
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I think part of the reason that candidates with public experience are hired is the “I went through it, so you need to too” type thing. They know they're good at what they do, and they did xyz to get there, so surely everyone else needs to have xyz to be any good. There's also an element of it that people think, due to the sheer variety, you'll have to have been exposed to good methods in accounting. You'll see clients that are pretty bad, but surely you'll see some good ones, too. Whereas if I hire someone with 20 years of experience all at one place, all they'll know is how their employer did things, which may or may not be good. So, in a way, public is seen as a “standardized curriculum” for experience. Because of that, it's valued in the same way that the CPA is valued over a high GPA, cause the CPA exams are standardized, but the GPA could be different from one school to another for the same level of knowledge.
I will say that my year in small-firm tax/bookkeeping/payroll accounting has helped me out in ways I didn't think it would at the time. I got a touch of exposure to many different things, which enabled me to have a clue at least about what I was doing in several different areas of accounting. I can help answer questions for our HR/Payroll lady related to IRS guidelines on payroll, and I can pick up our sales tax return and figure it out without anyone showing me, and I can check a trial balance for oddities, etc. etc., several different pieces of accounting. My other accounting job that I had prior to my current Controller job was working in AR/revenue for a large international company; I learned there a lot of very useful skills and information, too, but it was much narrower. So, I learned things about internal control and policies which have helped here, but they were all in the context of revenue. So, even though I didn't do auditing during my time in public, I have to admit that the exposure to all parts of the accounting life-cycle and in various industries did help me to excel better in my career.
Note: I've never actually hired someone with public experience (had to stop and think for a minute there…), so it's not that I am one who will only hire public experience, but I also haven't hired for many positions. I'm just starting to realize some of what my year in public did give me, even though at the time it seemed like mind-numbing work that a computer could do if you just programmed it right, and I didn't see at the time how it was really benefiting me, except for allowing me to meet “experience required” job postings.
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