By Zorana Milovanovic, MBA
MBA Student, Sofia University
For a long time, I thought a successful career was supposed to make sense when you looked at it on paper.
You choose a field. You develop expertise in that field. You move progressively into more senior positions. Eventually, your résumé tells a clean, logical story.
Mine does not.
Before building my career in accounting, I worked as a promoter. I was a sales representative and team leader for a cosmetics company. I worked as a barista, bartender, and waitress. I tutored students.
My education has been similarly broad. I studied international business, accounting and auditing, and finance management and investments. I built my professional career in accounting and eventually worked in the finance organization of a publicly traded biotechnology company, where my responsibilities expanded into internal controls, ERP systems, expense management, policies, and process improvement.
Now, I am studying the intersection of artificial intelligence and business while becoming increasingly interested in business transformation and leadership.
Sales. Hospitality. Teaching. International business. Accounting. Finance. Biotechnology. ERP systems. Internal controls. AI.
At first glance, that can look like a collection of unrelated experiences.
But I am beginning to see something different.
They are converging.
Careers Are Not Only Built Through Job Titles
Traditional career advice often encourages us to think linearly: choose a profession, become good at it, specialize, and move up.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that model. Deep expertise matters. But I think we sometimes confuse intentionality with linearity.
Careers are not built only through job titles. They are also built through capabilities, and capabilities are remarkably transferable.
When I worked as a promoter, I thought I was learning how to sell. I was. But I was also learning how to approach people, communicate quickly, handle rejection, and persuade someone to take action.
As a sales representative and team leader for a cosmetics company, I learned more about sales, but also recruiting, leadership, marketing, logistics, customer relationships, and responsibility for results.
At the time, I wasn’t thinking about stakeholder management or change management. I was simply doing my job.
Years later, I would need many of those same capabilities in completely different environments.
From a Crowded Café to an ERP Implementation
Some of the most transferable lessons came from jobs that seem least connected to what I do today.
One experience from my time working at a café in Serbia has stayed with me.
We were hosting a party with more than 100 guests. There were only two waitresses—my coworker and me—and one barista.
The café was crowded and loud. Guests were impatient. Everyone seemed to want something immediately. Orders piled up. We became nervous, and as the pressure increased, we started mixing some of them up. That created even more problems.
But there was no opportunity to stop the party until we felt less stressed. The customers were still there. The orders still had to go out.
We had to keep moving, communicate, correct mistakes, decide what needed attention first, and get through the rush.
Years later, I found myself in a completely different kind of pressure.
I was working on a system implementation with go-live approximately one month away, and we were nowhere near where we wanted to be.
Some days started with meetings at 7 a.m. and continued until 6 p.m. One meeting went directly into another. There were days when there was barely time for lunch. Project managers were anxious. Frustrations were high. Conversations became tense. At times, our team’s competence was openly questioned.
And strangely, part of that environment felt familiar.
I was no longer carrying orders through a crowded café in Serbia. I was discussing systems, integrations, testing, defects, deadlines, and business requirements.
The technical complexity was completely different.
The underlying capability was not.
When everything around you feels urgent, becoming overwhelmed does not make the situation less urgent. You still have to determine what matters most, communicate, correct mistakes, think clearly enough to make the next decision, and keep moving.
That does not mean stress should be ignored or that relentless working conditions should be normalized. Sustainable performance matters. But sometimes the pressure is already there and the immediate problem still needs to be solved.
In those moments, composure becomes a practical business skill.
I did not know it at the time, but a crowded café in Serbia was one of the places where I first started developing it.
Tutoring Followed Me Into Corporate Accounting
Tutoring was another experience I once considered separate from my professional career.
It taught me patience, but more importantly, it taught me how to transfer knowledge.
Knowing something yourself is very different from helping someone else understand it. As a tutor, I had to recognize where someone was getting stuck and find another way to explain the concept.
Years later, I found myself preparing and delivering company-wide employee training.
Instead of explaining coursework, I might be explaining an expense process, a system, a policy, or why employees needed to do something differently.
The context had changed. The fundamental question had not:
How do I take something I understand and make it understandable to someone else?
What once looked like tutoring had evolved into employee training, stakeholder communication, user adoption, and change management.
The skill had traveled with me.
Accounting Taught Me How Businesses Actually Work
When I entered accounting, I thought becoming better at accounting meant learning increasingly complex accounting concepts.
Technical knowledge certainly mattered. But accounting gave me something else: a front-row seat to how a business actually operates.
An expense report could lead to questions about employee behavior, corporate policy, technology, approvals, budgets, internal controls, and organizational culture.
A journal entry could involve operations, payroll, procurement, legal agreements, banking activity, or a system implementation.
An ERP problem was rarely only an accounting problem. It might involve system configuration, data, permissions, integrations, workflow design, user behavior, or communication between Finance and IT.
Gradually, I became less interested in simply processing what happened inside the business and more interested in understanding why the business operated that way in the first place.
Why does this process work this way? Why are employees struggling with it? Where is the control risk? Can the system automate this? Why are we doing this manually? What happens if we change it?
That curiosity changed the direction of my career.
Career Capital Compounds
Looking backward, I can see a pattern that I could not see while I was living it.
Sales taught me persuasion and communication. Leadership introduced recruiting and accountability. Hospitality taught me how to operate when several things become urgent simultaneously. Tutoring taught me knowledge transfer.
International business gave me a broader view of organizations and markets. Accounting taught me how transactions move through an organization and eventually become financial statements. Finance expanded my perspective toward capital, investment, risk, and decision-making.
Internal controls taught me to think systematically about risk, accountability, evidence, and process design. ERP implementation taught me that technology cannot fix a poorly understood business process—and that a technically correct system can still fail if people cannot use it effectively.
Cross-functional projects taught me how differently Finance, IT, HR, Procurement, Operations, auditors, executives, and employees can see the exact same problem.
Now AI is adding another dimension: how emerging technology may reshape workflows, controls, decision-making, and entire business models.
None of these experiences replaced the previous ones.
They accumulated.
That is what I have started thinking of as career capital.
We often think about career development in terms of credentials: another degree, certification, promotion, technical skill, or recognizable employer. Those things matter.
But there is another form of career capital that is harder to quantify: the combination of perspectives and capabilities we accumulate over time.
Expertise in accounting, technology, controls, and operations is valuable individually. But understanding several of those worlds well enough to connect them creates a different kind of value.
That combination is difficult to acquire through a single degree, course, or job description.
It develops through exposure.
Pay Attention to What Keeps Following You
This realization has changed how I think about my own professional identity.
“Accountant” is accurate, but increasingly incomplete.
The work that interests me most sits at the intersection of finance, accounting, systems, controls, processes, technology, and people.
I want to understand how a financial process operates today, identify where it breaks down, determine what should change, build appropriate controls, use technology intelligently, and help the people affected by that change successfully adopt it.
I have started thinking of myself as a finance and accounting transformation professional.
That identity makes many seemingly disconnected parts of my background suddenly make sense.
Perhaps I did not move from one unrelated experience to another. Perhaps I have been accumulating different tools for answering the same fundamental question:
How do organizations actually work, and how can we make them work better?
Direction Is Not the Same as Certainty
Students and young professionals face constant pressure to know what they want to do, what they should specialize in, and where they see themselves in five years.
Those are useful questions. Direction matters.
But direction is not the same as certainty.
A career plan should provide direction, not become a contract with your younger self.
You are allowed to discover an interest in something you did not know existed. You are allowed to develop expertise outside your original degree. You are allowed to combine disciplines. And you are allowed to be at a stage where the pieces have not connected yet.
Instead of asking only, “How does this fit my career plan?” perhaps we should also ask:
“What capability is this experience helping me build?”
The answer may become important much later.
The Intersections May Be the Point
This idea may become even more important as AI changes the workplace.
As technology becomes increasingly capable of performing standardized tasks, professional value may depend even more on judgment, systems thinking, communication, adaptability, problem framing, leadership, and the ability to connect knowledge across disciplines.
Accounting plus technology. Finance plus data. Operations plus AI. Psychology plus leadership. Technical expertise plus communication.
The advantage may not always come from knowing one subject better than everyone else. Sometimes it may come from understanding several worlds well enough to connect them.
That is why I no longer think of my earlier jobs as unrelated experiences I had before my “real career” started.
They were part of the career.
The promoter was learning persuasion. The sales representative was learning sales and ownership. The team leader was learning leadership. The waitress, bartender, and barista were learning execution under pressure. The tutor was learning knowledge transfer. The accountant was learning how organizations operate.
And the finance and accounting transformation professional gets to use all of it.
Your career does not have to make perfect sense while you are building it.
Look underneath the job titles. Pay attention to the capabilities that keep following you. Notice which combinations are becoming uniquely yours.
Knowledge travels. Skills transfer. Experiences compound.
Sometimes the meaning appears later.
And sometimes what initially looks like a collection of unrelated experiences becomes exactly what differentiates you.
About the Author
Zorana Milovanovic, MBA, is a finance and accounting professional with experience in public-company accounting, financial reporting, internal controls, ERP implementation, expense management, and process transformation. Her work focuses on the intersection of accounting, technology, systems, and business operations. She is currently pursuing an MBA at Sofia University, where she is studying the intersection of artificial intelligence and business. Her interests include finance and accounting transformation, enterprise systems, AI in business, and developing more effective ways for organizations and people to work.
