Attracting accountants: How to future-proof the profession

Garreth Hanley:
This is With Interest, a business finance and accounting news podcast, brought to you by CPA Australia.

Elinor Kasapidis:
Hello, and welcome to CPA Australia's With Interest podcast. I'm Elinor Kasapidis, chief of policy standards and external affairs. Today we're exploring the current state of attracting and retaining accounting talent.

Our guest, Bruce Vivian, head of accountancy education at IFAC will be sharing expert insights into the opportunities and challenges associated with becoming an accounting professional in today's world. Welcome, Bruce.

Bruce Vivian:
Thanks, Elinor. Great to be with you. Thanks for this opportunity.

Elinor Kasapidis:
Now before we delve into today's topic, it'd be great for our listeners to hear what inspired your journey into accountancy education and how does your role at IFAC shape the future of the profession.

Bruce Vivian:
Yes, I feel privileged to have had a really interesting career journey, I suppose. I qualified as a chartered accountant in South Africa and did that through the fairly generic path of three years with a firm and I did my university education, but I think what was always happening in my mind and in what I was interested in was looking for opportunities to teach, looking for opportunities to be involved in education.

I always had an interest in why we were teaching and how we were teaching and maybe could be done better sometimes. I was always interested in how people learned, how we learn, and I wanted to help people to learn better. As I've continued on through my career, I've been fortunate to have various roles that have allowed me to flex some of those muscles. So yes, building off of my core qualification, my technical skills and so on, but finding opportunities to mix that in with education and to develop my skills and education.

Right now in my role at IFAC, I feel very privileged to be able to work together with experts from all around the world who are real leaders in accountancy education, and my role is really about bringing those experts together and helping us to work together to advance accountancy education around the world.

Elinor Kasapidis:
I love the global approach and certainly CPA Australia has looked at a lot of the challenges that we have with attracting and retaining talent, and IFAC has produced some very insightful analysis and resources on the topic as well.

Education is transforming, the professional landscape is transforming. What do you think are some of the key drivers of current negative perceptions of the profession and where are the opportunities to turn things around?

Bruce Vivian:
So, Elinor, I would say this is a complex issue. It's multifaceted and it varies in the way it presents across jurisdictions, but broadly there are three kind of buckets I suppose we can put the challenges into. I'll describe them as the perception issue, the reality issue, and the accessibility issue. So the perception issue is really the way people perceive us as accountants as being boring, as our job being very manual, being just about the numbers, and I really think this comes down to the idea that we need to actually just get better at telling our story because we know we are none of those things, and in fact this is an incredibly dynamic and exciting profession, very tech forward. We need to be better at telling that story.

Then there's the reality issue, and this is where we've got to be a bit honest sometimes about what it's like to work in our profession. Sometimes the lived experience, especially for graduates, for aspiring professional accountants, just isn't great. And so we need to be honest with ourselves and we need to work to address some of the problem areas we have around work-life balance and mental health and so on.

And then the accessibility issue, and this is one I'm particularly passionate about. I think very often in the profession unintentionally we have put up barriers that have prevented certain groups of people from being a part of our profession. This is linked to time, our qualifications can be very long. Cost, they can be very expensive, and difficult, they can be incredibly challenging.

By difficulty, I don't mean that our qualifications should not be difficult. We want people to be highly competent, but sometimes we exclude people who have the right capabilities because of the way we design and deliver examinations. And so I think we need to rethink the whole journey that a young person goes on and where there might be barriers or obstacles that will prevent some from being able to access the profession even though they may be highly competent, highly talented, and we need to think differently about that.

So the perception issue, the reality issue, the accessibility issue, and I think we've got to look at those three together as we try to turn things around and see increased amounts of talent coming back into the profession.

Elinor Kasapidis:
That was a really helpful breakdown of perception, reality, and accessibility. If I could go back to the perception piece, we are all doing a lot of initiatives to promote the dynamism of our membership and of professional accountants.

You do outreach all across the world. Are there regions or countries that are leading the way in really promoting the profession and attracting young talent, and what can others learn from them?

Bruce Vivian:
Yes, we see some amazing leadership happening all around the world. A lot of that is big picture changes such as increasing the number of pathways into the profession, increasing school engagement, enhancing the study support that a young person receives or the funding that they receive, especially if they have less resources. I could tell you many stories about amazing work that professional accountancy organisations like CPA Australia, including CPA Australia, are doing.

But as I was reflecting on this question, Elinor, I was struck by the privilege I've had in this role to see how it's not just institutional change that helps, but it's the innovation that individuals drive, and I see that particularly those involved in education, those in the classroom, and just people who've said, "We see that we can't just continue to do things the way we've always done them."

If we are going to present the profession in an appropriate way to students and if we are going to expose them to what the profession really looks like to prepare them for their future roles which will likely be different to what is happening now then we need to innovate. We need to challenge and change. And so what I've been seeing just is some of these amazing individuals. There's one that I came across a person who's a lecturer and they worked very early on as ChatGPT came about to start using that as a tool to build AI tutors to help learners in their learning journey.

I've seen people using the classroom as a base to develop professional skills like collaboration, communication, and decision-making. We sometimes find some of those in academia have become very focused on the technical skills which partly is because as a profession that's what we've asked of them, but there's this increasing shift by individuals to say, "How can we use the classroom to build some of these other skills? Yes, we'll do the technical, but we want to be showing a young person about the opportunity that this profession gives to you to work in teams, to be in front of clients, to be at the centre of decision-making."

Seen some really cool stuff with students being sent overseas on exchange programs. That's nothing new, but just some lecturers who've said, "I want to get my students to be exposed to the global nature of this profession." And then one of my favourites is just when an educator says, "You know what? I'm a professional educator. I'm not in practice. I'm not doing this in the real world currently, but I know people who are. I have a network."

And so they bring experts from practice, from business who are doing exciting things out there in the real world that bring them into the classroom through guest lectures or they run simulations where they bring people who do this on a day-to-day basis in the real world, and this just all helps. This is all about how do you change this perception, and I worry about how many students we've lost because they do Accounting 101 and they find it to be just incredibly boring, incredibly mundane, it's just numbers, it's just basic bookkeeping.

But really some of this other stuff is so exciting, like the way we use technology, the way we interact with others, the global nature of our profession, and just how exciting it can be to be at the centre of business and of the public sector and of the nonprofit sector and driving change. So that's I think where I would go, and I'm not going... I know you asked me about any specific regions or countries.

I'm going to avoid calling out any countries in specifically to not prejudice anyone, but it's these individual stories I've come across that are just so inspiring and I think really would challenge anyone who's involved in education to just be constantly innovating and never stand still.

Elinor Kasapidis:
You've certainly inspired me, Bruce, and what we do see is a lot of that connection piece. So increasingly as a professional accountancy organisation like ourselves, talking to universities, talking to employers in business and practitioners, how do we actually collectively present and bring that experience to the students so that they can see the opportunities that are available to them. So it's really exciting.

You mentioned university students, but actually the love of numbers and storytelling and engaging with business and society starts a little bit younger. So exploring about the potential to reach accountants or potential accountants even earlier, could we start a primary school? Is there a way to incorporate a little bit more of that exciting stuff in the high school curriculum? How do you think we might broach that area?

Bruce Vivian:
Yeah, I mean, the first thing I'd say, Elinor, is that I think we need to stop seeing ourselves as the only ones who need accountancy skills. I think accountancy skills are a basic life skill. We all need it. We all need to be able to manage our own finances. We need to know what our assets are. We need to know how much we owe. We need to know what our income is, our expenses.

We need to understand how a particular financial decision like buying a car will impact on that picture, our kind of personal financial position. So the language of accounting is something that I really do believe we need to share and we need to develop in young people from a very early age. I don't see any reason why a primary school child should not be understanding what it means to receive some income and to spend that on things that they like, and then over time start learning some of these other things around assets and liabilities and then things like insurance and investments and so on.

The more we start building that almost that lexicon of language for them and concept early on, the more they will be able to take ownership and leadership in their own personal finance journey. But there's this spillover benefit to us as a profession. They'll actually understand what we do because hey, if you're enjoying that, if you find that interesting, did you know that you can do this for organisations, for companies, that you can manage billions of dollars worth of funds for other people? That's what we do, supporting decision-making in these large organisations.

And so I think there's something in that around accountancy literacy, and of course then the link to entrepreneurship. I see it with my son who's only 11 years old and he's already dreaming. He was just telling us the other day he's wanted to be a pilot most of his life until recently he started talking to us about how, no, he actually thinks he wants to start his own airline. He's 11 years old, and how can you then in the education system take advantage of that kind of passion and say, "Okay. Cool, so you want to start your own airline. What does it involve? What are you going to need?" and start developing some of those business skills that are also so core to what we do.

So I think part of it is probably not adding a course in the curriculum called accounting, but maybe something that really focuses on our personal finance journeys and then linking that beyond. Beyond that, I do think there's an opportunity for the profession to provide opportunities for young people to reach out, to engage with professional bodies like CPA Australia, to attend events, to get some swag and some cool stuff, and to meet interesting people, to get access to mentors, to coaches, and so on who can help them early on.

I think there's opportunities to run these programs more substantially than we have historically looking just for any opportunity to engage young people. The final point I'll make here is when I think about the accountancy profession, one of the amazing things is we have just an army of people, the members of the professional bodies like CPA Australia members who are across countries in some of the largest cities, in some of the smallest locations.

Almost every school around the world will likely have... or maybe I'm exaggerating but let me exaggerate... every school will likely have a parent who's somehow connected to accountancy, and it's on that army of people to be engaging and to be finding ways to support teachers as they tell the story of accounting to make sure that it's being shared with young people in a way that they can understand, that they can get excited about, much the way they might with other professions like lawyers or doctors and so on.

Accounting needs to be part of the language of a young person growing up that they know the role accountants play in society, and for those who want to, that they can actually pursue it and get the support they need early on so we can reduce the friction that might prevent somebody from pursuing an accountancy qualification.

Elinor Kasapidis:
Thank you, Bruce. I love that. I'm going to shift the focus of the podcast now to AI because everyone's talking about it and we're hearing how it's reshaping entry-level roles across professional services including accounting. So how do you think about this and how might the profession adapt to maintain our relevance and integrity and actually reap the benefits of this technology?

Bruce Vivian:
Yes, I was in a event a couple months ago with some leaders from firms who are at the cutting edge of seeing how AI affects practice and so on. What was fascinating in listening to them, it was a roundtable that had educators and had people from the firms and some other stakeholders, and the firms said to the educators, "We are going to need you to be producing people who have a second year level of skill, so as though you've been working for a year already, but that's what we need a young person to have at the point they enter."

That's incredibly scary for those in education. I think that's incredibly scary even for the students coming through. The expectations on them are going to be so much higher. I do worry personally around how we are going to make sure that we don't leave anyone behind as we go through this transition and what we do with the reality that some of the traditional practical experience, the place where so many of us cut our teeth and how we learn so many of the skills we take for granted today, if there is an opportunity to practice that in the real world, where are you going to get that and how are you going to make sure that you don't fall behind your peers, those who are a couple of years ahead of you, that you can make sure you still learn and you develop the skills you need.

This is a very real issue that I think we need to tackle across the accountancy education ecosystem, but I think there's so much positive too. So if the education system, if the way we teach is reflective of the emerging practice with AI, if we have people who are in practice coming into the classroom and sharing examples and supporting lecturers to develop case studies and simulations and so on that are reflective of the way accountancy is practiced alongside AI, with AI as a member of the team, if we're building those types of skills from the beginning I think we've got a chance of setting up young people for success.

We don't know exactly what the future of accountancy is going to look like with artificial intelligence. It's ongoing. Maybe we're overstating it, maybe we're understating it. But what is absolutely certain is that the practice of accountancy is changing and some of these traditional junior roles are going away, and we need to think very carefully then how we develop a young person.

I mentioned earlier some of these amazing educators who are focusing on some of the professional skills like your collaboration skills, communication skills, critical thinking, decision-making, and at IFAC we are convinced that those are the skills that are not going to go away. Those are the skills that are going to help a young professional accountant to be successful in a world with artificial intelligence embedded in everything they do, and so placing more emphasis on that.

Of course, we don't want to lose the technical skills, we do need to develop those skills, but the technical skills alone will no longer differentiate anyone in the market. It's going to be those other more professional skills that we need to develop. And so that's where I think we need to focus, and again, that's so linked to the real world. I'll just keep going back to that because making education look like the real world is probably the best way we can make sure that we are preparing future professional accountants for the world they are going to work in.

Elinor Kasapidis:
Bruce, your recognition of the need for professional skills is really important because I've been hearing a lot about becoming storytellers and strategic thinkers, and that some of that more transactional groundwork that forms the basis, you sort of have to skip that level and really start to be able to evaluate the outputs that might be AI supported. There's an ethics and governance piece as well, understanding your responsibilities when using AI and using these sorts of technologies.

So in terms of professional skills, just exploring that a little bit better, how do you think young people can get out there and find those opportunities? You mentioned employers and universities. Are there other things that they can do in their own communities or in their own time? Do you have any ideas around that?

Bruce Vivian:
Yeah, I mean, I think the whole idea that your education can't just be your formal education and it also can't be... it's not even just your formal education plus your practical experience at a firm. It's more than that. It's your whole formation as a person, as a professional, that encompasses what you do for fun, encompasses what you do for the greater good, how you serve in your community, the active role you play in society, and more and more we want to see the profession ready.

We believe our profession has such a critical role to play in the advancement and sustainable development of society, and that means we need young people who are coming through thinking about those things, and many do, but absolutely the education is not just that traditional part that we've spoken about. One of the things that I've found really interesting, we don't mention it often in the context of professional skills, soft skills, but creativity is becoming so important.

So ensuring that we are providing spaces for young people to play, to try out ideas, sandboxes where they can practice and test things out and make mistakes and so on. This happens in other fields, it doesn't happen so much in accounting. We almost don't give that space to come in and fail and try new things and suggest. It's like, no, here's the standards, follow the standards, stick within the standards.

I'm a big believer in international standards, but we really want young people who can think outside the box, who can challenge ideas because as the profession changes, as the world changes, as we face new problems, new issues, we need that creative thinking. We always joke in the profession that creative accounting is this bad thing, and sure, by definition, yes, it is, but creative thinking is absolutely critical.

So I think it is about thinking a bit more broader around what education looks like. I also think there's a key part to this for the accountancy profession to think about learning journeys as being a lot less linear and a lot less having a clear start and end point. So I think the learning journey starts obviously from when we're born and throughout the formal education process and practical experience, but then what comes after that. We need to be providing opportunities for people to continue to further their learning and their growth, and I'm not just talking about CPD here.

CPD is important, but I'm talking about providing opportunities for a newly qualified professional accountant to start to specialise, to start to become experts in the areas that they're most interested in. For me, that was education. I really wanted to become an expert in education, and for a bit, I added a bit of public sector to that, and I learned, and I tried to study and learn more and more and more, and I think there's an opportunity to try and do more of that as well.

So really thinking about this as an education life cycle and recognising that education is not done in this linear one-size-fits-all fashion. People will enter our profession in different ways, they hopefully won't exit, but they'll go off on different pathways, and we need to be providing opportunities for a young person to go on that exploratory journey and develop their skills in an organic way and in a way that reflects the real world that they are operating in, that they're going to practice in.

Elinor Kasapidis:
I think creativity as well as curiosity is the other word that I've been hearing, so the why. When something doesn't quite add up or there's a pattern there that doesn't quite look right, it's taking that next step and unpacking things. Would you agree?

Bruce Vivian:
Oh yeah, we love this whole idea. We just added it to our international education standards recently. This idea of intellectual curiosity as a skill, not just as a posture, as an idea, but a skill that when you see a problem, when you see a challenge, you don't say, "Oh, I've never seen this before. I don't know what to do." You'd rather see it, you say, "Oh, I don't know how to do this, but I'm going to investigate. I'm going to talk to people in my network. I'm going to use AI to see if I can find some solutions. I'm going to read up in different literature. And so I'm going to do whatever it takes to get those answers, and as I do that I'm going to be helping my client, but I'm also going to be learning myself and developing myself." So this posture of intellectual curiosity.

As accountants we are being asked to do a whole lot of things we never trained on, that we've never done before, and if we come with the skill of intellectual curiosity, what that does is just sets us up as being real lifelong learners, people who are constantly developing, constantly growing, constantly trying new things. Man, the thing that gets me excited about that is how cool a career is that, that you are going to be learning nonstop. You're going to be doing new things. In 40 years' time when you're nearing the end of your career, you're still going to be learning, you're still going to be tackling new challenges, you're still going to be inspired. Perhaps that's a bit of the story we need to tell about our profession as well and the opportunities it presents.

Elinor Kasapidis:
It certainly keeps the inspiration going, and it's incredible to see people's careers as they continue through a wide range of different experiences, and they do have that commonality, creativity, intellectual curiosity. For my last question, I wanted to talk a little bit more about the reality. So you talked about how the attractiveness of the profession, sometimes that reality, particularly in the early stages of the career, can be really challenging when it comes to the retention of staff. How do you think we can tackle that part of the puzzle?

Bruce Vivian:
So this may sound really silly, but we've got to create safe spaces. We've got to be creating spaces for a young person to come in and develop their professional skills and develop their professional experience without constantly living in fear of making mistakes, for one, which I mentioned earlier, or just getting crushed by the weight of expectation that, oh, you're going to work these long hours, oh, you're going to be delivering this high quality work and so on constantly, really creating the space where it's supposed to be a journey of learning.

It's supposed to be a journey of growth and helping a person to discover how you can really reach these high quality standards that we expect in the profession and how you can deliver great work and value to your clients, but creating these spaces that recognise that a young person is coming in, they're being expected to do more than they've ever been done before, right, entering essentially a second year level with no experience.

We're asking so much of them that giving that support is going to be absolutely critical. So spaces to fail, really leaning into the coaching and the mentoring of young people. I can't overstate this. It is absolutely critical that every young person who comes into our profession finds people who will hold their hand and will show them the way. Now I'm not saying make it easy. We know it's tough. We know there's some hard knocks that we've all got to go through, but we need to be realistic about what it's like coming into our profession and especially with all the change that's happening, and then try to put in place structures, whether that's at the employer level or whether that's at the wider professional level, really putting in place structures that can support a young person in that transition, and so kind of thinking more openly about that.

And then providing space for young people to provide feedback as well of what their experience is, and then empowering them to hopefully support the next generation that comes behind them. The final thing I would say just from a professional body standpoint is the more that we can get young people volunteering and being a part of the work of the professional accountancy organisation, and that's all the way from all committees and all the way up to boards and councils or whatever it might be in your organisation, we need to provide opportunities to make sure that that young generation's voices are being heard.

At IFAC we recently established a structure called the IFAC Young Leaders Collective, and this was all about ensuring that at IFAC we were hearing the voices of students and of early career professional accountants, making sure that their voice was being heard in some of the big decisions that we were trying to make together with the global profession. That's been absolutely magic to see how that shifted some of our thinking and how they've challenged us and how they're stretching us and pushing us. So yeah, safe spaces, lots of coaching and mentoring, and definitely providing opportunities for young people to be active in the profession and to be contributing and to be driving the profession forward.

Elinor Kasapidis:
Thank you so much, Bruce. This has been a fantastic discussion, and I love that we've covered everything from accounting literacy at primary school through to new pathways into the profession and helping people through their growth journey, including, like you said, a lot of mentoring, support, and coaching, and the idea as well, of course, that as a professional it's not just your technical or education, it's also what you do in society and community, and that message of listening, so listening to the feedback that we hear, giving people what they need to support them to be the best professional accountants ever. So, Bruce, thank you so much for joining us today.

Bruce Vivian:
Thank you, Elinor. It's been a great privilege. Appreciate it.

Elinor Kasapidis:
And thank you for listening to With Interest. Don't forget to check the show notes for links and resources from CPA Australia and IFAC. If you liked this episode, please share it with friends and colleagues and hit the subscribe button so you don't miss future episodes. Until next time, thanks for listening.

Garreth Hanley:
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