Accountants work to shed ‘boring’ tag amid hiring crisis
“We’ve heard the rumours that accounting is nerdy and boring,” a US accounting trade body confides on one of its websites, before adding: “We’ve gotta let you in on a secret. That is just not true.”
Faced with a sharp decline in the number of people taking exams for entry to the profession, and a slide in interest in university accounting courses that hints at deeper trouble to come, the industry is trying to reverse the trend.
From the Big Four audit firms to state accounting regulators, players are pursuing a raft of new measures to attract people to a career in accounting, including advertising to high-schoolers and programmes to cut the cost of becoming a certified public accountant (CPA).
The industry is lobbying in favour of two bills on Capitol Hill that would allow funding from government programmes for STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) courses to be directed to accounting, too, on the grounds that it is now a high-tech profession.
“The profession has changed so much,” said Colleen Conrad, executive vice-president of the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (Nasba), which represents industry regulators. “Technology is in pretty much everything you do in the accounting profession and CPAs spend a lot of time with internal controls, system controls, cyber security.”
In her speech, Ho of the PCAOB identified lower starting salaries compared with other professions as a key problem. “Starting salary in the audit profession is lower than other professions, such as data scientists and IT professionals,” she said. “In my opinion, this is a crisis. We cannot afford a world with no accountants or a capital market with no auditors.”
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics found average annual salary for auditors and accountants nationally to be $77,250 for 2021, though pay for those at the largest firms is significantly higher. Social media forums and jobs boards often carry complaints from early-career accountants about gruelling hours, as well as low pay.
Abrash said the shortage was “not an economic only issue” as “this is not a generation that is all about money”.
And Nasba’s Conrad said an economic downturn might help swing people back to the profession.
“When the economy is good, the market is good, there is a lot of M&A activity, people that might go into accounting may say they’ll go into finance,” she said. “If the economy starts to turn and we start to see lay-offs as we have recently among the investment banks, you may see people coming back to accounting.
“Accounting is solid. You can always get a job as a CPA.”
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Stephen Foley
