After the last decade of strategizing against the existential pipeline crisis facing our profession, I bet you never thought you'd hear the words, "We have too many accountants."
Solving the pipeline crisis has been part of every accounting conference's agenda, and has been the top priority item on every society's planning agenda.
Bringing awareness to the profession, improving the reputation of the job, making the CPA license more accessible. We went after the youth … and it worked.
After a steady decline in enrollments, things turned around in 2024 with an approximately 12% uptick in undergrad accounting major declarations, followed by that trend continuing in 2025 with another uptick of about 7%. Clearly, the push and campaigns worked, but I fear we have a different pipeline issue now.
It's not a matter of quantity, but a matter of quality. It's not that we don't have enough petroleum in our pipelines, it's that we don't have a high enough octane to perform what we need it to do.
What changed
You can probably guess, because it's the only thing our society talks about anymore: artificial intelligence.
On one hand, AI created a magnificent opportunity for the accounting profession, because we truly could become empowered to be the strategic advisors we knew we were (if we could just get our heads above water from the insurmountable workload).
AI took over the tedious, repetitive and draining tasks that nobody wanted to do, and that likely discouraged the youth from being inspired to join the accounting profession in the first place. Heck, I left public accounting because although I was told I embodied partner attributes (and I would have loved to be engaged in partner-type work duties), I was not inspired enough to grind through a good chunk of my career just to get to that point of being eligible.
With the new generation, this was exacerbated. They don't want to spend more than a few minutes doing something they aren't inspired to do or interested in, even if it is for longer-term benefit.
Thanks to AI, we've been able to showcase what life as a CPA who is actually operating in their highest and best use looks like, especially when they are doing truly valuable and inspiring work.
But here's the flip.
With staff level work being predominantly performed by technology, new professionals aren't gaining the experience that empowers them to do that valuable and inspiring work. They aren't getting the chance to grow into their highest and best use.
What we are witnessing is no longer a pipeline shortage; instead, we are experiencing a talent gap.
Why so serious?
I know this comes off as bleak initially, but we have to be real with ourselves. We've done a tremendous job of bringing awareness to our profession and inspiring the youth to pursue accounting, but with new factors come new strategies.
We need to find a way to help professionals land roles where they can learn and grow, without complete AI reliance, so they can be the high-output achievers that they're striving to become. And we need to do it fast.
Anyone who is sitting there with five or more years of experience is golden, because they can use AI to manage tax, audit or accounting staff work at an exponentially more productive level. Private equity investors will certainly love that. These professionals are your premium performance fuel. But that reservoir is drying up as they progress through their career, and the low-grade fuel isn't being refined quick enough to refill it.
In the next two years, the first uptick in new accounting majors will be graduating, but what will their role exactly be?
Firms in general, thanks to technology, PE, political affairs and other macroeconomic factors, are not hiring as much.
We went from not knowing how the dwindling accounting workforce would be able to handle the growing workload, to not knowing what accounting staff work will even entail.
I'm not here to detonate dynamite or be a constant fire alarm puller; I'm just here to say out loud that I see this happening in front of us, and I'm not seeing enough of us talking about it, let alone doing something about it.
What can we do about it?
I come bearing thoughts and possibilities, because if there's one thing I've never had a pipeline crisis of, it's ideas.
Many conversations I've recently had have led me to believe that the future may involve some sort of apprenticeship model in the profession, similar to that of a doctor or harbor pilot.
At one point I was going to say lawyer as well, but they're going to be facing the same talent issue as us. Contract lawyers know what to look for in contracts because they spent five years doing tedious boring work reading through them; and they were paid extremely well to do that work. Now that AI can scan contracts in seconds, where will the experience that only comes from repetition be developed? And if a staffer would just be leaning on AI to do this, why should they be paid the insane starting salaries they have typically received?
In a way, by increasing new staff compensation to draw in talent, we've emulated the legal profession; but getting someone in the door and getting them to stay are two different tasks.
A firm cannot afford to pay staff as high a rate to do work that AI can do, and it doesn't make sense to pay them to review AI's work because they don't have any experience to apply toward being a reviewer.
Add onto that the fact that most of these staff members leave after a few years anyway, and even if a firm did choose to invest in paying this talent to learn anyway, they may get no ROI, and it's a downward spiral with seemingly no escape.
So I'll reframe back to the apprenticeship model.
If someone goes straight through a medical education career path from high school, they'll spend all of their 20s in debt and have no ability to pay it off. In case you don't know, resident doctors do not get paid well at all (much less than our profession's entry-level positions), but that's because they need to be at the top of their game before they can be a full-on doctor (and rightfully so — lives are at stake).
No resident doctor, earning $50,000 per year is complaining, though, because they know as soon as they finish, that number gets another "0" added to the end.
Very few even get admitted to go on this journey, and only the most dedicated will make their way through it entirely, because it's not easy to spend that much time in the red; but once they're in, they're in for life, and invaluable to our society.
Perhaps I'm crazy, and although we aren't dealing with lives, I believe there is a way to iterate off of this concept.
There must be a way to train new accounting staff by giving them the experience that helps transform them and grow them into the massively valuable professionals that they can be. There may be fewer overall, but they will be highly reputable and committed to the role.
Think of it as a career staircase with quick immediate inclines, rather than a steady progression ladder. Even visualizing this is a great first step for us to take in strategizing what the profession looks like in the future.
Of course, the downside is that what I've just proposed risks a huge burden on individuals to fund their way to success, but we are not the only profession dealing with this. AI is disrupting our economy whether we like it to or not, and these changes are going to happen (and fast).
So now what?
The beautiful thing about our free market is there's a natural balancing act that occurs, and equilibrium is achieved organically as firms get creative in finding ways to not just find the right talent, but to train them, retain them and optimize them.
Talented professionals will be a benefactor of this, because they will be invested in and find a long and fruitful career. Firms that figure out how to accomplish their own talent-mining system will set the standard for how other firms who wish to succeed will build theirs, while those who don't adapt will be left in the dust.
Like death and taxes, these things are inevitable. So start thinking about it, talking about it, and when you get the chance to implement change, do something about it.
