Inside the AICPA’s effort to enhance the skills of early-career CPAs

Sponsored by Thomson Reuters

Early this month, the AICPA launched its Profession Ready Initiative. In this episode of the JofA podcast, Carl Mayes, CPA, the AICPA’s vice president–CPA Candidate Quality and Competency, explained more about the initiative and why a rapidly changing workplace demands new skills from emerging and early-career CPAs.

He discussed how automation, AI, and offshoring are reshaping entry-level work — and how Rise2040 research is informing the initiative.

Listeners will learn how to get involved, what’s planned for ENGAGE, and how the effort benefits both early-career professionals and experienced CPAs.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• Why the AICPA launched the Profession Ready Initiative.
• How Rise2040 research informed the approach to improving entry-level CPA skills.
• The ways automation, AI, and offshoring are reshaping the first years of CPA careers — and what new competencies employers say they need as a result.
• The initiative’s multifaceted approach, including research, new learning solutions, academic collaboration, and state-level engagement.
• Ways that CPAs, educators, and firms can participate.
• How the effort will benefit both early-career professionals and experienced CPAs.

Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:

— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Neil Amato at Neil.Amato@aicpa-cima.com.

Transcript

Neil Amato: Hello, Journal of Accountancy podcast listeners. Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I’m Neil Amato with the JofA. The AICPA’s Profession Ready Initiative is the topic today. And what it is, when it is happening, and why it’s been launched — all of that is coming up right after this brief sponsor message.

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Amato: Welcome back. Joining me on the podcast is Carl Mayes, the AICPA’s vice president–CPA Candidate Quality and Competency. Carl and I are going to be discussing the Profession Ready Initiative in detail. You’re a repeat guest, Carl, so welcome back to the JofA podcast.

Carl Mayes: Thanks, Neil. It’s good to be here.

Amato: We’re glad to have you back. Glad to have you back in our organization as well, so thank you. First, what is the Profession Ready Initiative, and what needs is it intended to address?

Mayes: Profession Ready is one of our top strategic priorities at the Association. We’re pretty excited about it. It’s a holistic effort to address early-career skills gaps that have been identified through Rise2040 and other research.

When we say it’s a holistic effort, it means we’re taking all the different lenses that we could take as we think about early-career skills gaps, and we’re attacking it from every one of those angles.

We’re attacking it through a research lens, and we’ll talk more about that, from an employer perspective and how do we support the employers in that space, and then from an academic perspective, from a communication perspective. A lot of time and effort, a lot of focus being lent to this area and excited to share more about it.

Amato: You mentioned Rise2040. For people who may just be hearing about that, what is it, and how does it tie into the Profession Ready Initiative?

Mayes: Rise2040 is an effort to define the trends, opportunities, and shared vision that will guide us as a profession through 2040 and beyond. Really, it’s kind of a visioning project. Folks can think about previous visioning projects that we’ve done for whatever reason, generally, they’re around 15 years. We’ve got the 2040 project going on, and one of the themes that is emerging from Rise2040 is a need for talent transformation, especially at the entry level.

Employers are increasingly leveraging AI and automation to perform rote tasks that I performed when I graduated. Automation tools are vouching and tracing and drawing samples, they’re reading contracts, and they’re changing the landscape for early-career auditors.

Those tools can also populate a tax return using data from the client way faster than we ever could manually. Then they have research tools that can give you answers to complex accounting, tax, or audit questions almost instantaneously.

In addition to that, we’re seeing more firms engaging in offshoring, so 46% of top-performing firms, and I want to say 29% of firms overall, according to the PCPS MAP survey, are engaging in offshoring. As a result, employers are telling us they need aspirant CPAs who are coming out of school to be able to do more, not just tick and tie and go up that career ramp, that onboarding ramp that so many of us went through, but review procedures that are performed by offshore staff or review the output of a bot and think critically about whether what they’re seeing makes sense.

As states adopt new pathways to licensure, allowing for a bachelor’s degree instead of 150 credit hours, the amount of time that educators have to bring students up to speed before they start their career is being truncated.

The result is a confluence of trends, creating a skills gap at that entry level, and those trends are only going to strengthen as time goes on, and addressing those is really what Profession Ready is all about.

Amato: I think that’s a good summary, thank you. Lindsay Stevenson has been a guest on this podcast over the years. She clearly has a passion for the profession, and related to this, she is chair of the Profession Ready Initiative Advisory Group. Last summer, she said to me in part, “Transformation right now in the profession is a state of being. It’s no longer aspirational.” What do you think about that as it relates to this initiative?

Mayes: We love Lindsay, and that’s a great quote. She’s a fantastic leader for our advisory group and look forward to continuing to work with her and leveraging her insights. I think that quote is right on point. The question is what can we, as the AICPA, do about it? If transformation is a state of being, it’s no longer aspirational. We’re collectively all transforming in one way or another. How can the AICPA support our members?

With respect to Profession Ready, what we’re going to do, and I alluded to some of this earlier, we’re going to research the early-career skills and competencies that are needed by employers in this new normal, and we’re going to develop a skills and competency framework to serve as a north star for the profession’s stakeholders.

We’re going to build learning solutions that leverage that research and leverage emerging technologies to help close the gaps for employers, and we’re going to work with educators in the academic space to drive best practices and promote available resources.

We’ll partner with state societies to create engagement and drive a groundswell of support while giving folks at the state level a chance to influence national thought leadership, and we’ll support it all with a robust communication campaign.

That’s really what this initiative is all about. It’s a holistic effort, directly responsive to the themes of Rise2040, responsive to Lindsay’s quote there about the need for transformation, the fact that it’s no longer aspirational, and responsive to the needs and pain points of our profession.

We really feel like, collectively, between all those deliverables I mentioned a second ago, we’ll be giving the profession and its stakeholders the tools that we need to bridge the early-career skills gap, enhance workforce readiness, and transform the talent pool.

Amato: We wrote about this on journalofaccountancy.com in early February. We’ll link to that article in the show notes. That article has some of the timeline particulars, but could you talk about some of the ongoing ways that the AICPA is listening to members on this topic?

Mayes: Engagement with membership on this is incredibly important. I mentioned the research effort, and ultimately what we come out with, if we come out with a skills and competency framework, we want that framework to be reflective of the actual needs of employers in this new normal.

In terms of opportunities for folks to get involved, there are a lot. We’ve had a number of discussion groups already with folks from various different corners of the profession, from forensic evaluation to A&A and tax and early-career professionals and folks representing state boards, all kinds of different folks.

I want to say we’ve talked with over 200 people, even at this very early stage of this initiative. But from here, we’ll have periodic surveys. There’s actually one outstanding right now. Encourage folks to go to our website and check that out, and there will be more surveys after busy season, gathering information and helping guide our decision-making as we pull together the learning solutions, as we pull together a competency framework for early-career professionals.

We’ll have additional discussion groups over the summer, including with the academic audience, and we’ll have formal focus groups during our validation stage, which will be in the June to December time frame.

Ultimately we’ll expose what we’ve pulled together in an exposure draft around mid-2027, so lots and lots of opportunity for folks to get involved and really encourage folks to do just that.

Amato: You mentioned that June time frame, summer, as some of the things ongoing or kicking off. What is the plan related to the Profession Ready Initiative for ENGAGE, which begins Monday, June 8?

Mayes: ENGAGE, it’s our 10th anniversary, great opportunity for us to engage with membership and with the profession there, no pun intended. Our game plan, we will have a lunch and learn while we’re there. It’ll be an opportunity for us to talk directly with members who are physically in the room and poll the members on various different research questions that we’re digging into at that stage of the research project. It’ll be an opportunity for folks who are attending ENGAGE to have a direct impact on where we ultimately land, so really looking forward to that in the June time frame.

Amato: It’s clear that the focus is on emerging or early-career professionals, but how can this benefit established CPAs?

Mayes: I think, at the end of the day, it’s about helping those emerging early-career professionals meet the needs of established CPAs. I think it’s really about both audiences.

When you think about, maybe it’s a manager and the time and effort that a manager would spend training somebody up and getting them up to speed at the entry level, maybe a senior, training them up and getting them up to speed. If we can expedite that process and if we can put these folks in a position where they can be delivering greater value earlier in their career, that’s nothing but good for those experienced, established CPAs and for the employers overall.

I’d also say, when you think about the types of things that I used to do when I first came out of school and the types of things that many of us as experienced CPAs did when we first got out of school, ticking and tying and footing things, vouching and tracing and so on — if we can train folks up so that they can leverage higher-order skills earlier in their career, that does nothing but make this career path more attractive, and that can help with retention. That can help with the branding of the profession, so we think there’s lots of opportunity here to help both the early-career folks and the profession at large.

Amato: This is just getting started, plenty of work to be done, plenty of listening to be done, but what else as a closing thought do you think is important for people to take away from this conversation about the Profession Ready Initiative?

Mayes: I’d say the biggest takeaway is get involved. Go to our website, aicpa-cima.com/professionready, and explore a little bit, see some of the things that we have going on, and look at the opportunities to make your voice heard — the surveys, the discussion groups, the focus groups.

As we develop our learning solution, there will be opportunities for us to engage with the profession in that way and give feedback on the best way to serve folks in that direction.

If you’re in the educator community, there will be opportunities over the summer for those discussion groups, and we’ll have surveys and so on over the summer, so get involved. Tell us what you think and help guide us as we seek to serve the profession in this really important area.

Amato: Carl Mayes, really appreciate your time on the JofA podcast.

Mayes: Neil, thanks a lot, man.