Pilot program set to help all stakeholders along the talent pipeline

The 150-hour education requirement for CPA licensure has become a target for some who see it as an easy way to ease the talent pipeline issues facing the profession.

“Unfortunately, there’s no simple answer when you have a complicated problem,” Sue Coffey, CPA, CGMA, the AICPA’s CEO–Public Accounting, said at ENGAGE earlier this month.

What if firms seeking fully equipped employees and students looking to join the workforce now could come together and turn any obstacles created by the 150-hour requirement into an opportunity for all?

That’s exactly what a pilot program set to launch this fall aims to do.

The Experience, Learn & Earn (ELE) program, developed by the AICPA and the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) in concert with stakeholders all along the talent pipeline, aims to help students reach the finish line with as much undue stress — financial and otherwise — as is reasonable.

For students soon to be CPAs, and for firms seeking the services of CPAs in a challenging time for talent acquisition, ELE is so much more than a program poised to reduce education costs.

It’s a program poised to elevate education, opportunity, and ultimately, the profession as a whole.

“I previously worked on the CPA Evolution initiative, and while we were working on that together with NASBA, we started to hear a lot of comments about the 150-credit hour requirement and specifically the cost to obtain — the financial cost and the opportunity cost — of getting those extra 30 hours,” Julia Woislaw, AICPA Senior Manager–CPA Evolution, said during a recent AICPA Town Hall. “So we started looking at how we can help students bridge those gaps.

“And,” Woislaw added, “we ultimately see this as a recruitment tool for firms.”

ELE is the first action item in the AICPA’s evoloving Pipeline Acceleration Plan, endorsed in May by AICPA Council as a multifaceted strategy designed to tackle the talent shortage facing the profession.

“Very often students graduate with somewhere between 120 and 150 hours of education, so we’ve designed the program to be flexible,” Coffey explained at ENGAGE. “The individual would start with a firm immediately as a first-year associate — not as an intern, but as a first-year associate. They would be receiving pay and benefits, but they would be given time by the firm to perform online courses. And the courses are designed then to filter through the work they’re doing, and for both the work and the courses, they’d be getting up to 30 credit hours of education.

“And of course, they would be working on clients like any first-year associate would, so they would be creating billable hours.”

Woislaw said that the program, once matured, will be scalable for students and employers alike. The student’s cost per credit hour will be in the $150 range — the average national cost of a credit hour at a community college. Over one to two years, students can earn the number of credits they need to reach 150 hours and qualify for CPA licensure.

“Our No. 1 goal is that this is cost-effective for the student,” Woislaw said. “We want this to be scalable, so that a firm of any size or any practice type could participate if they want to hire students into the program. And importantly, this would require minimal to no changes to state laws and rules. That really helps us preserve CPA mobility and helps us move this a lot faster than if we had to do extensive state regulatory changes.”

Coffey said the pilot program will pair students with accounting firms, but the goal eventually is to allow any company seeking CPAs to participate. The AICPA and NASBA are looking for firms interested in participating as well as universities, ideally securing at least one university per state.

“But the education is online, so you could be working anywhere in the country,” Coffey said. “I’m very excited about the pilot. We’re going to learn from it.”

— To comment on this article or to suggest an idea for another article, contact Bryan Strickland at Bryan.Strickland@aicpa-cima.com.