While concerns remain about the profession's pipeline of new accountants, Cathy Moy, chief people officer at BDO USA, sees plenty of ways to keep it full -- and to make sure it meets firms' demands for all kinds of talent.
Transcription (transcript created by AI; in case of discrepancies, review the recorded version):
Dan Hood (00:03):
Welcome to On the Air with Accounting Today. I'm Editor-in-Chief Dan Hood. There have been some encouraging rises in students enrolling in accounting programs of late, and that combined with the rise of automation and outsourcing options, has raised all kinds of questions about what exactly the future of the accounting workforce and its capacity options are going to look like here to dive into all that. This is Cathy Moy. She's the chief people officer at Top 10 Firm BDO USA. Cathy, thanks for joining us.
Cathy Moy (00:26):
It's my absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me, Dan.
Dan Hood (00:29):
This is a big topic we were talking a little bit earlier. This is a big deal. There's a lot going on in this space just in terms of the pipeline issues and staffing and the future of the workforce of accounting. So I'm excited to dive into it with you. Let's talk about just, I mentioned some of the positive trends in accounting enrollments over the last couple of years. They've been ticking up a little bit for undergraduate enrollment. Do you think we've sort of turned the corner on the pipeline problem? Are we looking at the beginning of the end?
Cathy Moy (00:53):
No, I think a little bit the more things change, the more they stay the same. So I don't think we've turned the corner because I don't think there are corners. I think there's cycle. So I think of them in circles more than I do in squares, meaning over time this a little bit ebbs and flows somewhat connected to the macroeconomic environment. We are an attractive profession when there's macroeconomic uncertainty. Someone's not sure if there are opportunities in investment banking and things that are a little more volatile in terms of their opportunities, and we're a sure bet, steady opportunity career place. So I think there's a bit of that, that trends in our favor. There's also real work that's being done by the profession to elevate the visibility for those who don't have visibility on the career path to educate more people who don't have someone at the dinner table who's a CPA to say, why don't you follow in my footsteps?
(01:48):
So a couple examples I'm involved in. The Center for Audit Quality does some amazing work going to high schools. I had the chance to be in a urban high school in the Greater Washington, DC area recently and talking to students about the profession, different people telling their stories. And it ended with somebody getting a scholarship who wrote an essay about wanting to pursue the career. And it doesn't take long to see the mother hiding behind the chairs and the auditorium to surprise her daughter and the daughter screaming and excitement and say that just ignites an inspiration in everybody about showing the possibilities to a broader group of younger people as to maybe what they might want to do to join an important profession. So there are a couple things going on there.
Dan Hood (02:36):
Yep. I'm going to take just a brief detour here because you raised a point that it's a thing I'm personally fascinated by, which I'm curious, how did you get into accounting? How did you end up in the accounting space? Was there a family member? You mentioned having someone at the dinner table who was the CPA. How did you end up in the accounting space?
Cathy Moy (02:52):
Well, I do have a CPA older brother, but what I like to say, which is also factual, is there were 19,500 reasons I majored in accounting, plus they paid for overtime. To me, the fun interesting question is, but why did you stay? Okay, you wanted a job and there was a pretty sure bet if you could do this, apply yourself to this and you could be pretty good at it. You could have a good paying job and a career path. But why, for goodness sake, did you stay? Well, why I stayed was, wow, it starts being paid graduate school. Just live business case studies happening in front of you at every client. So what a great education no matter where you then go. And the fastest path to the boardroom, then working your way up a corporate ladder versus getting to be on an audit team and to see that a lot sooner.
(03:43):
So that was attractive. But boy, I stayed all the way till now because you're just surrounded by bright, energized people. So I love the relationships. I can tolerate the debits and credits, but I love the relationships, love the business challenges. I just like the dynamic, smart environment that you get to be in. Right,
Dan Hood (04:04):
Right. Well, and the reason I ask that question, because I'm fascinated by it, because inevitably there's one of two or three answers usually. The first one is a family member was a CPA or an accountant, mother, father, uncle, something like that. Two, they happened to take almost by accident an accounting course in college and it just sort of clicked. The number of people who literally say, "It just clicked. It just made sense to me. It spoke to me is one." And then money, as people look at it and say, as you say, it's a reliable profession. It's safe, particularly in times of troubled economics. They look to it for that. But all of those, the thing that does hell have in common is exposure to the profession. Huge numbers of people just never have any exposure to accounting. They never see it. They never take the class because they don't think of accounting as a thing that they might do for a bunch of different reasons, or they don't have a relative who can expose them to, or they'll learn about the financial rewards that are open to it because they're not exposed to it.
(04:59):
So really, as you say, that sort of reaching out to people of all kinds and exposing them to what accounting can be and can do for them is hugely important.
Cathy Moy (05:07):
I agree. And it's only in recent years, at least in my involvement, that the profession's been owning that together, not for the advancement of any particular firm, but there's something here bigger than all of us. So let's get to the high schools together and or let's get to the two-year college. There's so many good reasons people are starting their career journeys at two-year institutions now. It's more affordable. Where I live, it's free. There are lots of more economic possibilities there. And the American Accounting Association, AAA, I'm on their foundation board and they own this two-year symposium to speak to the students about converting into four-year accounting degrees. And they call it a bridge for a reason. Come across and chart your course to your future here. So I think I'm proud of the profession for elevating the visibility, not just to solve a talent problem, but to pay forward the opportunities we've all been provided and feel good about that as well.
Dan Hood (06:07):
Very cool. Now, the interesting thing is you talked about reaching out to high schools. We see accountants going to elementary schools in some very rare cases, but still even at high schools, even at college, you're still looking at the people you touched today may not get into accounting for three, four, five, six years, depending on what the path is, depending whether they're pursuing a CPA and so on. But this is a fairly long-term solution or mid to long-term solution. How long do you think before we can start seeing these efforts really pay off in the workforce in the sense of bringing in the new people that we need, bringing in the new accountants into space? If we're talking to, like I said, high schoolers or even people in two-year college program, they've still got at least two more years to go and so on. So are we looking at three, four, five years down the line?
Cathy Moy (06:57):
Yeah. Well, I mean, time flies, two, three, four years goes by and suddenly they're there. I think it's also not something you can turn on and off and say, "We need some people, so let's start this and it's going to be too..." This is a continuous effort. If I had a dollar for every time over many years that people use the phrase the war for talent, I'd be a very wealthy person because this has been bringing talent into the profession and getting what you need to elevate your firm and solve your client's problems and so forth has been a very long-term effort. And so I think the idea is, yes, for today's high school senior, it's going to be at least five years before they're an associate in your staff room, but that's okay. You do this every year and you create that pipeline so that you always have, not just the economy's this way or revenues that way, we do or we don't need people.
(07:52):
Things like that kind of effort, just like your core values and your core purpose, you don't turn them on or off their steady state.
Dan Hood (07:59):
Well, and that's a difficult thing for, well, not just for accounts, for any industry to realize that when it's easy to drop these programs when things get good to say, "Wow, you know what? There's all kinds of people coming in now because of the work we did five years ago, so we don't need to go back to the high schools and the two-year colleges." Whereas you say, your point is they need to stick with that so that even in good times, you're still reaching out to keep that pipeline moving, keep it full all the time because otherwise it'll fall
Cathy Moy (08:24):
Off.You don't only call your bank when you need money, right?
Dan Hood (08:27):
Right, right. You're talking about the phrase the war for talent. My favorite aspect of that is the number of times you hear people sort of Freudian slip style saying the war on talent, which-
Cathy Moy (08:39):
Yes, it makes me quietly chuckle as well.
Dan Hood (08:41):
I know what they- Yeah, you hear what you're saying, right? You hear what you're saying when you say war on talent. Fortunately, I haven't heard someone say that in a couple of years, which I think is an encouraging sign, but always cracked me up.
(08:54):
So let's talk about this in terms of demand, in terms of demand for staff. And I'm sort of thinking this is almost more of a capacity issue as we think about outsourcing and offshoring and automation and AI coming in. People are looking at, I think a lot of firms are feeling less pressure to a certain degree for, or we're hearing anecdotally, firms feeling a little less pressure on the staffing front, in part because of the things they've put in place over the last several years, including among other things, raising salaries so that it's more attractive to current potential job seekers. But also in terms of automation and offshoring, they found some solutions that I think in many cases they thought would be temporary, but now they're realizing, well, actually we could sort of rearrange, rethink our demand, our need for capacity and say it doesn't always have to be solved by a person.
(09:41):
They could be solved by offshoring, could be solved by automation. Do we feel comfortable in terms of the demand over the near term in terms of being able to get the work done? Put it that way.
Cathy Moy (09:51):
Yeah, it's interesting. It's a perfectly legitimate way to think about it. It's just not my frame of thinking. And this is what I mean by that. I don't see it as a mathematical problem of we have this many units of output. Are we going to get it from humans here or are we going to get it from AI or other technology enablements or are we going to get it from people who live far away from here? How are we going to make the math work? It limits the inspiration, I find. And if though we think about how are we going to elevate everybody's experience, our client's experience and our people's experience Because for me, the use of automation, AI, or having services available around the clock because we're working across very diverse time zones, boy, that gets a lot more done for clients a lot more quickly.
(10:40):
It enables our people to do more interesting things. They're operating a higher level in college sometimes than what they then need to do on their first day of an audit. So how about they use that capacity to get to do more interesting, more intriguing, more meaningfilled moments? The productivity measures I think are to me a consequence. And so it's just a more inspiring way to think about it from my perspective. Yeah.
Dan Hood (11:09):
Sure. Well, I mean, absolutely, 100%. I think for a lot of firms, the war for talent was so desperate that they had to be thinking very, well, put it numerically, put it a little coldly in the sense of how do we solve these problems. Now they're in a position, I think, to do more, to think more the way you're talking about, to think more about it, let's elevate everybody's experience. I mean, one of the things of all the different sort of grunt work, rote work sort of work that can be taken off the backs of entry-level staff to make their work more exciting, to give them options to do more interesting work. Those are huge, huge benefits of that expansion of the capacity, the set of capacity solutions available to firms. I'm thinking of it, as you said, in a very cold calculation kind of way, but it sort of frees up all that often frees up time and effort and space for people to have much more exciting careers to get better client service, et cetera, et
Cathy Moy (12:01):
Cetera. It's not cold. It's very practical and both things can be true. The beauty is both things can be true. We can solve the mathematical problem and have elevated experiences for our clients and our people as well. So that's a beautiful thing.
Dan Hood (12:13):
Excellent. All right, I want to flip us around. We've just talked a little bit from the perspective of the profession at a firms and how they're thinking about looking at staffing and finding more people to bring on board, bring into the profession. I want to sort of flip a little bit and talk about the prospective job candidates and the future accountants point of view, but we're going to take a quick break before we do that. So we'll step away for just a second. All right, and we're back and we're talking with Cathy Moy of BDO about people and staffing and the future of the accounting workforce and what's going on and where it stands now and where it might be in the future. And we've talked, like I said, a lot about the firms and the perfection's perspective on this issue. I mean, there's a lot more we could have talked about, but we have less than four to 500 days to talk through all these issues.
(13:08):
So I want to flip it around and talk about what do new staff want? What are potential the workforce in the future? What are they looking for from their employers? Over the last 30 years or so, we've seen a lot of accounting firms, I don't want to say forced, but we've seen them moving towards accommodating the needs of newer generations and newer in the workforce often reluctantly in the sort of sense of, I didn't get all these benefits. Why do they get all these benefits? I had to do grunt work. Why don't they have to do grunt work? But anyways, they sort of come around to the understanding that new generations of workforce will have demands. And with the pipeline issues and the talent issues firms have, they've had to meet those demands. So let's talk a little bit about what do recent graduates, what are they looking for from their employers?
Cathy Moy (13:53):
Well, let me zoom out for a minute. You stop me if this is too far afield, but here's the way I think about it real big. I think it's really hard to be human right now on planet Earth for a whole host of reasons that you might turn on the morning news and fill in the list quickly of the things that stress people out. But I also think in the study show, the happiness indices are falling. The US in particular is dropping like a rock in terms of how happy we are despite the bounty that we have, and particularly in the age group we're talking about of moving into their professions for the first time. So you start with that mindset of a generally anxious, generally unhappy, and maybe it's because move back a generation or more. And more often on average, people had places of comfort and healing and support like a very tight family unit where three generations might live in a house, for example, and many have moved away.
(14:55):
That's still true for some people, but much of America has moved into a more geographically dispersed setup or their house of worship, still very, very true for a good number of people. But on average, less people are filling the synagogues and church pews and so forth and finding that their place of community and healing. And so people come to work now and say, is this my community? Is this where I connect? Is this where I heal? Is this where somebody cares about me? Is this who I trust? And trust, I mean, on the trust indices, trust barometers and studies, your employer has elevated maybe because of the drop of some other things, but employers, the people's best hope actually for where they're going to have a place of trust. And so we have a great opportunity, but that's where we start. And so we've got this space we can hold.
(15:53):
So what are they looking for? Bring it back to earth and back to entering your profession. People are looking for someone who cares. They're looking for having a voice. Is somebody listening to me? Do I get to impact something in some way? And is someone actively developing me? I want to do important work. I want to have a voice in it. I want to learn and grow and I want to know the people around me care about me and we have meaningful connections. So I think that's what it is. Now, what do we do about that? Some of it's programmatic. BDO, for instance, we have a career advisor for every person. We have a strategic one-on-one program to have one-on-one meaningful conversations every month. We have a peer advisor, peer mentor network, so circles, if you will, of peer mentors to help each other out and share experiences, feel part of something bigger.
(16:56):
We listen carefully. So people do have a voice. We have an executive team advisory council, cross-function, cross-experience levels to sit with our executive team and give the people's view of the challenges and opportunities we face. We do a pulse survey, our annual engagement survey, and we have greater than 90% of the people participate every year, which tells me they feel we're listening and doing something with it or those numbers would drop. Also greater than 90% say they have a sense of belonging and see their future at BDO. And so these are the things we do, and they're all important. They all matter. But I worry about anywhere that's too programmatic because this really takes off and really has meaning to people. Most of their experience happens right around them. How do my colleagues interact with me? How do they show up for me? It's a very close-knit.
(17:52):
Your experience is very much impacted and influenced by the people right around you. So I think it's creating those moments that matter for each other. It might matter a whole lot more to you that somebody saw you're busy and brought an extra sandwich back and some formal program exists that you read about on the website. So that's how I think about it is we have opportunities, have really connected human experiences, and the age group we're talking about on average has struggles to know how to connect. So we've got to help.
Dan Hood (18:30):
Gotcha. Well, it's interesting because the basic, we were talking about that broader picture of what people are looking for just in our lives and so on. The workforce is a natural place to look for that, but accounting firms have ... I'm going to suggest a little bit of a leg up there. And one, it's a profession. So there's a natural sort of sense of belonging that goes ... I think it's different to join a profession to be a lawyer or a doctor or a CPA than it is to be, "I work in business," or, "I work for a bank," or it's not the same level of belonging I think that you get. We talked to, CPA is super proud of it and reasonably. So they've had a major achievement and they belong to this profession that works together to build its pipeline and to make the business world better and so on.
(19:11):
So there's a natural advantage there. But then you talk about that, the difference between a programmatic approach and a daily everybody really living and breathing this sort of thing. I think it's very difficult accounting firms are used to, particularly those that have older leadership groups still in place. They're used to the structure of the firm doing a lot of this work for them. The accounting profession was always sort of, yeah, you go, you work for three years, we don't really need to tell you, you just do heads down work for three years and then maybe you move up to manager and then maybe you make partner. And there was a very set of path for people to grow up in accounting profession and it didn't require much intervention on the part of firm leadership. And it worked still. It created people who are deeply engaged in their profession and deeply engaged with their firms and so on, but it's certainly not enough anymore.
(19:55):
And I wonder if our firm's ready to do that, to take that sort of intentional approach to it. Yeah.
Cathy Moy (20:01):
Well, and even then, even back when, if I go back to my earlier days, then regardless of your profession, I think every one of us, if you stop and think, who made a moment for me that helped build my confidence, for example? And I remember, or who showed my work was important and they cared about me. I remember, I mean, I remember the ... I grew up as an auditor, by the way, was an audit partner for many years. And I remember my first audit when I was just trying not to embarrass myself and keep your head down and your literal pencil moving in those days. And the office managing partner was the engagement partner. So that is the definition of omniscient from my perspective at that time. And he finished reviewing my area and he looked up and said, "Where's the associate?" Me and sat me down next to him.
(20:58):
I can tell you I was not doing the important part of the audit. I was doing the beginner part of the audit, but it wasn't about getting that right because the audit opinion was going to be impacted. It was about him demonstrating to me, "Your work is important. I took the time to go through it and I want to teach you something you can do better next time." And I don't want to tell you how many years ago that was, but I remember it like yesterday. And we all have those moments that somebody lifted your level of feeling seen and heard and cared for and you left with walking a little bit taller and a little bit more confident. So regardless of the times and the things that have and haven't changed, I think those very crystallized moments that matter are created timelessly,
Dan Hood (21:47):
But also created intentionally, the person's got to do it. I don't want to harp too much on the programmatic aspect of things, but it's very easy to say, "Okay, this is what we do and this is how it happens." And to miss that there's an enormous human element to making sure that
Cathy Moy (22:00):
Works.That's exactly right. I guess the litmus test is when you wake up in the morning and think about what's important to you in your day. Do you think about that, how you're going to affect someone else's day? There
Dan Hood (22:12):
You go. All right, that's a lot. I mean, one of the things, it is a lot of extra work, I think, on a part of particularly managers and leaders and so on, that they may not ... Again, I say in the past they never had to do or didn't have to do as much of, or that's my impression of me. You have a different take on that.
Cathy Moy (22:28):
I don't love the phrase yes, but, but there's a little bit of a, maybe it's yes and. Yes. And they come to realize that it doesn't actually take much time at all and there's a force multiplier there. Someone will leave with a multitude of energy for the rest of their day and collectively will get that much more done. But I do think on average our more experienced people, not just BDO people, I think just people because we're mostly humble. We underestimate the impact those little moments have. We underestimate just what smiling at somebody or saying, "You look a little off. I'm thinking coffee. You want coffee?" And just getting somebody out of their space and taking a minute to care. It actually takes very little time, time that would've been spent, I don't know, chatting in the hallway or doing something else. It's time that we all have, and I think it's a force multiply.
Dan Hood (23:22):
Gotcha. All right. Maybe to think a little programmatically, what are some things for ... I mean, obviously BDO is a large organization with a lot of resources and a lot of capacity, to put it that way, to think about these issues and to act on them. Maybe I think for firms that maybe have a little less capacity, a little less in the way of resources, what are some things you would suggest programmatically? Because like I said, I don't want to harp on programmatically, but that's part of it. You got to have those programs in place, and then you add on top of it or put it on a foundation of the human moments. What are some things you've seen firms that they should be thinking about putting in place if they want to have that programmatic aspect of things taken care of?
Cathy Moy (24:04):
Yeah, well, I think there's things that everybody can do. Sometimes they're easier to do when you don't have to do them at scale. Everybody can have a career advisor and a buddy. Everybody can have no employee left behind, if you will, trying to program that if the organic channels aren't materializing for somebody, they've got an assigned buddy who's looking out for them. I mean, I like to say very empirically when we were working on our onboarding process and refreshing how new joiners come to be part of us, they laughed at me, but the team, my own team, rightly so. But I kept saying, "But who's having lunch on the first day?" My one question, I just have a recurring vision of someone going home from their first day and someone saying, "How was your day?" I'm like, "Well, I ate lunch by myself." Just creating those little, again, it's the little experiences, but any firm can make sure someone's having lunch on their first day, make sure someone has a career advisor, can make sure somebody is a buddy, and then has ways of listening, whether it's this idea that we did with an executive team advisory council, that could be, maybe you don't have a whole executive team, but a managing partner.
(25:18):
I mean, way back when when I started, we had a partner in my group who just picked two associates a week and went and had lunch. I mean, everybody can do something that creates some active listening and some elevating of voices. So I think there's some very simple, really no cost other than a little time and intention. Absolutely. And sometimes easier when you don't have to try to scale it.
Dan Hood (25:45):
Yeah, fair. Good point. So when do you look forward ahead of where we are now down the line a little bit, do you see the accounting workforce changing significantly, looking different, acting different, being managed differently? Or do you think it's just discretion of keeping to get people in and we may change some of the way they work and some of their workflows and so on, but by and large, the workforce will look similar, or do you see changes coming down the line for that?
Cathy Moy (26:14):
Yeah, it's an intriguing question, Dan. I think there are a lot of, again, core human elements that are timeless, but certainly the context will change. So we shouldn't keep our head down and say, we're doubling down on what we do now and we're going to keep doing it that way. And so with the evolution of, I mean, firm structures are changing, we're proud of our ESOP structure because we want to share our bounty and success with every single employee. So we're all beneficial owners here. Others have chosen private equity path. That's I'm sure a different vibe and a different way things get done, and some are continuing with the traditional partnership model. So each of those will bring some lens and some subtleties or less than subtleties in the way firms operate. And then there's the promise not yet fully realized of AI transformational AI enablement.
(27:10):
That'll be much different than it ever was. So I think our role in that is to make sure our people are future-proofed and resilient and skilled. So what does BDO aspire to be? We aspire to be the firm known for the best place to get developed, regardless of which piece is changing, but you come in and have confidence, whatever the unknown is, because the pace of change, everyone says change is constant, yes, and the pace of change accelerates. So you and I could sit and pretend five years from now, we probably have no idea what five years from now looks like because that's many years from now in terms of the pace of change. So I think we just need to commit and be real about ensuring our people are equipped for whatever next is.
Dan Hood (28:04):
Right. That's a huge challenge. I mean, to a certain degree, you look at the history of the profession for a long period of time, I mean generationally along three or four generations, I think it would be safe to say that while there were certainly changes going on, it didn't sit absolutely still. There were a lot of things that were very similar in terms of the skillsets that people were looking for, the pathways you took through the profession, a lot of the basics of how a firm ran. And to your point, those things are all changing every six months now, or it seems like every six months that they're changing. How do you keep up with that? I mean, I guess the question is, do we look ahead and say, wow, we've got to make sure we have a hugely flexible workforce? Or do we just say we're going to change our workforce every five, 10 years as the demand's different?
(28:50):
For instance, if we move away from less of a technical focus, for instance, because we think AI may handle some of the technical aspects of things, do we focus more on hiring people who are super strong in personal skills or advisory skills or insight, that kind of thing? How does that impact your thinking about building your workforce, particularly at a larger institution like yours where you've got a lot of people got a big mix?
Cathy Moy (29:14):
Yeah, I think it would be very difficult to execute against a plan that says this is one group of people. When the skills they need change, we'll just swap them out for the next group of people. I know that's not exactly what you said, but to be stark about it, right?
Dan Hood (29:27):
It's not a crazy, unreasonable interpretation.
Cathy Moy (29:29):
Okay, fair, fair. Thank you. Thank you for the grace. So I think I'd have trouble getting behind that strategy. I think we look for people who, they know what they know right now, but they have a growth mindset and a curiosity. And so that I can work with. I mean, we need clay. If you're coming in as a piece of granite, that's going to be tough. If you're coming in as a piece of clay that we can mold, I'd like to thank lots of people gave me a chance. I mean, I grew up as an audit partner, and as you can tell from this conversation, my role now is It's very different from that without having change careers, without having to change employers.What's better than that? But it's because somebody said, "I bet you could lean into this. Do you want to create something with me?
(30:10):
" And I'd like to have enough confidence in our people that they get a chance to have that kind of feeling, that I can evolve and grow here and I won't be swapped out as long as I do my part. I need to have a growth mindset. I need to be willing to take some risks. I need to invest my time in myself and I need to want to learn and try new things and be a critical thinker and just carry the traits that are necessary. I'd rather place our bets on hiring growth-minded, curious, smart people.
Dan Hood (30:47):
Excellent. Very cool. Like I said, we don't have all the time, but any final thoughts on how firms should be thinking about this or how firms should be approaching the future? I mean, I think that advice alone thinking about growth-minded people who are ready to change and ready to help make the change themselves is a great start.
Cathy Moy (31:03):
Yeah. Boy, I think maybe Simon Sinek had it right with the focus on the why. I think when we're engaging with future CPAs, future advisors, future client service professionals, the one true trendline is they do want to know why. Why am I coming to the office? Why are we doing this in person? Why am I doing this task? There isn't just a go do it. I'm hardworking. I want to develop, I want to grow, but tell me the why of what I'm doing. Why is it important? Why is it impactful? We spend, I think, maybe as a whole, not a media whole, but as a profession or maybe just as corporate America, we spend a lot of time focusing on the what and the how. And I think if we can elevate people to all talking about the why and we can elevate the experiences we offer each other and the way we engage with one another, I feel incredibly bullish about every journey.
(32:11):
I don't think anybody got lazier. I don't think anybody got less educated. I think we have a very willing, capable future of professionals and we just got to meet them where they are and actively engage with them and they'll help us find the way forward.
Dan Hood (32:29):
Excellent. And particularly because the why is so exciting. The why of accounting is better than a lot of other areas why. You're making people's lives better, you're making the economy work better, you're keeping it protected, so on and so forth. Great advice. Great thoughts. Cathy Moy of BDO, thank you so much for joining us.
Cathy Moy (32:44):
It's my absolute pleasure. Thanks for spending some time with me too.
Dan Hood (32:48):
Thank you all for listening. This episode of On the Air was produced by Accounting today with audio production by Adnan Khan. Rate us and review us on your favorite podcast platform and see the rest of our content on accountingtoday.com. Thanks again to our guests and thank you for listening.
