- The common characteristic of the AFR Top 100 Accounting Firms last year was multiple vacancies – with the big four firms carrying more than 500 apiece.
- Australian universities produce approximately 2,000 graduates each year. These graduates are hotly contested – by other firms and other industries.
- Top recruiters tell a story of culture, flexibility, potential and growth. The industry as a whole also has a role to play in attracting talent.
Almost every company on the Australian Financial Review Top 100 Accounting Firms Report last year had multiple vacancies; the big four consulting firms had more than 500 open positions each.
Yet Australian universities are only producing around 2,000 accounting graduates a year. Does the profession have an image problem?
Chair of Accounting and Business Information Systems at the University of Melbourne Professor Michael Davern believes it does.
“Fundamentally there is a misconception about what accounting is. People think it’s two things: they think it’s all about numbers, and that it’s going to be replaced by artificial intelligence and automation, both of which are wrong,” Davern says.
“People think accounting is simply bookkeeping. But accounting really is business storytelling with data. It’s about getting business data you can trust and understanding what it really means. It’s not simply number crunching. It’s about interpreting data and making sense of what’s going on in the business. It’s about providing the evidence base for decision making.”
Accountants themselves have a role in changing these misconceptions by recalibrating how they describe their profession.
“It’s about getting the message out to high school students, career counsellors and the business community that if they want to make the right decisions, they have to know the validity and interpretation of the evidence they are using, and that evidence is accounting-based numbers,” Davern says.
“Accounting is the science of measurement, and the art of persuasive communication to enable business-savvy decision making. It’s about how business creates value.”
Mismatched expectations
Automation is causing graduates to skip a phase at the beginning of their careers – it’s an educational phase Davern describes as “[doing] the grunt work as a way of understanding how things work”. This causes a mismatch between a graduate’s expectations and their first job.
“It’s actually a little more challenging because you can’t do the rule-based routine work anymore. You’ve got to come straight in and be thinking about ‘how do I solve business problems? How do I add value by helping the business make better decisions?’,” Davern says.
“The problem is twofold: One is getting the graduates ready for that in terms of … skill sets, and secondly the employers need to recognise that they’re getting potentially a much smarter graduate coming in whom they need to challenge and leverage.”
Competition from other industries
This fast-track to a higher-value skill set than ‘grunt work’ also means that graduates qualify for other, potentially higher-paying, career paths.
“We get people who might have done a degree in accounting and traditionally they would go into accounting, but now they go into things like data analysis,” says Richard Lloyd Accounting Recruitment Founding Director Geoff Balmer. “There’s a bit of a competition for talent because other industries are saying, ‘Well, if you’ve got great analytical skills and great IT skills, you can do other things apart from traditional accounting’.”
Balmer believes there are three key elements to attracting accounting graduates: flexibility, progression plans and growth potential.
“First, some form of hybrid working to allow for flexibility and life balance. The second is a clear progression goal: being able to say ‘you’ll start doing this, then in a year you’ll be this, and keep progressing and developing’,” he says. “The third is more about the long-term journey about where the role can take them; reassurance that there’s security and potential.”
Balmer also believes companies that have a solid grassroots training program have an edge.
“Companies find it hard to do this because they’ve all fallen into the trap of training really good people who then leave, but ultimately a good training culture is beneficial: get people on board, develop them, but also bring almost a tribal mindset – we’re all going to do this fun stuff together,” he explains.
“If you are one of several companies that all do tax returns, it’s very hard to offer something different. But if you focus on the culture side, then you can stand out. You can say ‘Come join us, we’ll train you, we’ll develop you, we’ll give you client-facing skills, we offer a great culture where new ideas are embraced, you can have an ownership, you can get involved in the social side of the firm’ – these companies tend to retain staff.”
The elephant in the room: AI
Both Balmer and Davern agree that the profession also needs to address the misconception that AI is a danger to the accounting industry.
“I’m very conscious that people are saying accountants are going to be replaced by an AI bot. I’d be more concerned if I was a lawyer or financial trader, because those are the sorts of things that can be structured,” Davern says.
“A lot of what we’re doing as accountants is actually people skills: developing relationships with clients and relationships in a business, interpreting ambiguous performance data, and understanding the challenges with managing the business.
“I think we’re in a much better position. The world just hasn’t realised that yet.”
