I'm a chartered accountant. Started in a small accountancy firm, then moved to a big 4 working in audit, then into corporate finance and now run business strategy and am CEO advisor in an insurance company. It's a great career choice and you can be pretty confident once you have an accounting qualification and some decent experience that you will always have work. However, I would say that what you are discovering about the high entry qualifications reflects that it's a very demanding choice and passing the accountancy exams is extremely difficult. I sat the exams at the same time as the straight A student from my school who studied economics at Cambridge and he failed one of the final papers. Having said that I know from personal experience that there are plenty of part qualified or non-qualified people working in our Finance department doing pure accountancy work who have 2:2 degrees in all sorts of subjects, so do not give up.