It’s no secret that finding and retaining talent is a major challenge for accounting firms and finance departments. The need for new talent is particularly pressing for CPA firms and accounting organizations as older CPAs are retiring and fewer younger accountants are lining up to take their places.
The accounting talent shortage is showing up in painful ways for some organizations: Tupperware delayed its public filings earlier this year when the company didn’t have enough accountants, the IRS is falling short on revenue goals because of a talent shortage, and the accountants who are working are more prone to burnout and errors.
Susan Coffey, CEO of public accounting at the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA), is at the forefront of efforts to address the accounting pipeline. She recently spoke with CFO Brew about the challenges facing accounting, how employers are responding to the talent shortage, and the skills that new accountants will need for the future.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How would you describe the accounting talent pipeline and the challenges that organizations are facing in that pipeline?
It’s interesting, because there are some hard trends that we’ve been seeing over the last several years. Probably since 2017, we’ve started to see declines in CPA exam-takers and college graduates in accounting. Studying it further, we saw, like every profession, that declining birth rates are finally catching up with us, and you know, our country’s immigration policy and what that means for talent coming in.
You have that group of hard trends that are kind of influencing, but then there are some soft trends that I think are leading to our talent challenges. They revolve around things like our image and the fact that, while we have a great story to tell about our profession and the opportunity our profession provides, we just don’t do a great job telling that story.
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We have some challenges with education, particularly in the early years of the college experience…in terms of content and how it’s taught.
Accountants who want to be CPAs need more support from their employers, in terms of financial support to take the exam and review courses. They tell us time to study is the biggest thing they want.
Another factor is the employee experience, those first five years of employment, particularly in a CPA firm, not as much in a finance department. The workload and entry level pay and things like that tend to be challenges. Diversity, equity, inclusion…the complexion of our profession does not match the complexion of our nation’s population or the businesses we serve, so we have to do a better job there.
How are the challenges in the talent pipeline showing up for employers?
We are a very important profession to our society and to our economy. And right now, employers, whether they’re finance departments or accounting departments or CPA firms, really continue to need high quality people. I think they’re finally starting to realize that looking at their business models and understanding how their business models are impacting either their ability to attract talent or their ability to retain talent is something that they have to look at.
What do you see organizations doing to successfully address some of the talent challenges?
They are clearly increasing starting salaries. They are clearly focusing on workload and work/life balance. They are clearly focusing on the types of clients they want to serve and the types of services they want to perform. Many of them are offshoring lower level and rote work, and all of them are really looking at their tech stacks and how they can create efficiencies and effectiveness around some of that lower level work as well, and providing tools for the higher level work.