The next generation's view of risk management: career or steppingstone?

A great benefit of my five-decade career in internal auditing and risk management is the opportunity to work with young people. 

Whether working alongside freshly minted graduates early in my career, working as an adjunct college professor in my mid-career, or speaking at colleges and universities today, being around young, eager minds is simply uplifting and inspiring for me.

So, it should come as no surprise that a recent visit to a major university provided fresh inspiration and insights including this one: The next generation is more likely to see accounting or internal auditing not as a career but as a steppingstone. And here's the shocker — that may not be a dreadful thing.

One of the biggest challenges facing internal auditing and accounting is recruiting the next generation of workers to each respective profession. The growing use of advanced technology, primarily artificial intelligence, promises significant changes in how accountants and internal auditors will work in the future. To be sure, some speculate AI could soon doom both professions to irrelevance. But as I noted in a recent blog post, the changing nature of our professions may position them for success in the AI era.

This is particularly relevant to how the next generation sees our professions and the kind of work that will attract them. As the first true digital natives, Gen Z and millennials are naturally comfortable with digital tools and platforms, often mastering them with ease. What's more, this influences how they work, learn and what they expect from their jobs.

So, what does this mean to our professions?

Deloitte's 2025 Gen Z and Millennial Survey addresses this question nicely. The survey of more than 23,000 young people concludes they are seeking a balance of money, meaning and well-being. From the report:

"Career fluidity is a defining feature of the modern workforce: Nearly one third (31%) of Gen Zs plan to switch employers in the next two years. And while millennials may be more settled in their careers, 17% say they plan to leave their employers within two years. Their job hopping is not driven by a lack of loyalty. Many Gen Zs and millennials see it as a strategy to seek stability, better work-life balance, a greater sense of purpose, and an opportunity to learn and acquire new skills."

This observation is backed up by longer-term data collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Its Employer Tenure in 2024 report found the median number of years that wage and salary workers had been at their current jobs dropped to 3.9 years in January 2024, the lowest since 2002. The report found workers between 25 and 34 years of age had a median job tenure of 2.7 years compared to 4.6 years for those 35-44, 7 years for those 45-54, and 9.6 years for those 55-64. 

This data supports my sense that the next generation is looking for jobs that will challenge them, give them opportunities to grow their skills, and provide the work-life balance they rate so highly. These factors also support the idea that young people are leveraging jobs in internal auditing and accounting as steppingstones to opportunity, not somewhere they will stay for a lifetime.

Here's why that's not a bad thing. If accounting and internal auditing are viewed as the front door to other career paths, we can succeed in recruiting top talent. The challenge is to present accounting and internal auditing as attractive, even exciting, steppingstones that offer stimulating and meaningful work, the opportunity to travel, competitive wages, and what I call a crow's nest view of the enterprise. This last aspect could be particularly alluring to younger workers if they see it as an opportunity to identify where they might go next.

Interestingly, the Deloitte survey found that the traditional ambition of "climbing the corporate ladder" is not particularly attractive to Gen Z. Indeed, the report found only 6% say their primary career goal is to reach a leadership position. However, those views could change over time, and a broad base of experience gleaned over numerous stops could be the ideal training for leadership roles within internal audit, finance or the C-suite.

I've had a chance to meet many people who came to internal auditing early in their careers, had a prosperous tenure there, then went into the business, who were later tapped to come back to be the chief audit executive. I'm one of them. It's not a badge of shame to leave internal audit because that may be your best strategy for a leadership role.

From an executive management perspective, this is an ideal strategy; leverage internal auditing and accounting to lure great talent into the organization.

I have written extensively in the past decade about how growing risk velocity, an increasingly volatile risk landscape, digital disruption and a sense of permacrisis are dramatically changing risk management. How we manage these new challenges will define the future not only for accounting and internal auditing, but for business. What I've learned is that trying to fit this new reality into traditional approaches to business will never succeed. We must accept change and embrace chaos.

And so it is with the views of the next generation of workers. They hold the key to balancing humanity with technology. We shouldn't get caught up in whether we will capture the best and the brightest for the next 40 years. But while we have them, we must ensure they develop the key skills that accounting and internal audit offer that AI cannot deliver: critical thinking, relationship acumen, intellectual curiosity, empathy and ethical resilience.