One of the reasons I love the accounting profession is it's a people business. As a CPA, you can enjoy a purpose-driven career focused on serving your community and the public interest. As technology unlocks new ways of working, maintaining the skills to connect with people is more valuable than ever.
The accounting profession is hyper-focused on ensuring the next generation of professionals understands what a CPA career can offer them and that the pipeline of talented students pursuing accounting careers grows. As a result, firm leaders are examining organizational culture and the return on investment for a public accounting career.
As we collectively search for innovative ways to reverse the decline in CPA candidates, the additional college education required for CPA licensure has become a hot topic. I believe the focus on reducing educational requirements is misplaced, and our efforts are better placed elsewhere as a profession. Here are four reasons why:
- Intense skill demands: The competencies we want to see in first-year accounting hires continue to evolve and are increasingly complex. Firms and other employers want new hires who are steeped in data, skilled at analysis, and ready to communicate the insights behind the numbers to various audiences effectively. The time to acquire those skills on top of technical accounting skills and other needed credits exceeds the 120 semester hours for a bachelor's degree. These necessary business skills were the impetus years ago behind the 150-credit hour requirement for licensure, and the demands are even higher today.
- The virtual nature of business: New hires and other workers expect their careers to go with them wherever they want to live and work. They want to serve interesting clients regardless of the client's state. As employers and as an accounting profession, we need to do all we can to make CPA licensure mobile, clear and efficient. Making significant changes to the licensure education requirement opens some risk for CPA mobility, which firms, CPAs and their clients rely on for multistate business without the need for additional licenses. Complicating or restricting CPA mobility is not in our profession's long-term best interest
- Promote the profession: We need to create awareness of our profession with underrepresented student populations, acknowledge the financial burden an extra year of schooling can put on students and advocate for and implement nontraditional articulation options, such as apprentice learning programs. Students of all backgrounds need to know that accounting is a dynamic and rewarding career, and they need to hear that message much earlier — be it middle school or elementary school. We need to put our support behind gaining STEM recognition for accounting as a technology (not math!) profession and be present in schools, telling our stories, educating students on the profession's evolution to a tech-driven career and debunking misconceptions about what it means to be an accountant.
- Focusing on quality: In the public eye and among regulators, users and other stakeholders, we have work to do to prove our continuous commitment to quality and protecting the public interest. Reducing entry requirements into accounting doesn't align with that goal.
As a new CEO, our firm's people and our next generation of talent are my top concerns because those individuals will look after our clients and our business. I support disrupting the status quo to improve, evolve and expand. But reducing the education requirement for licensure isn't where I'm placing my energy. The profession would benefit from taking a cohesive, dynamic approach to preparing CPAs to meet the data-heavy demands of clients and telling our story to future talent in new ways.
