The power of active listening in addressing the CPA skills gap

Sponsored by Thomson Reuters

Recorded at ENGAGE in Las Vegas, this episode of the JofA podcast features Carl Mayes, CPA, the AICPA’s vice president–Ethics & Firm Quality, discussing the Profession Ready Initiative and the evolving skills employers expect from current and aspiring CPAs.

Mayes shares insights from discussions with more than 1,000 members, including concerns about foundational accounting skills, communication abilities, and maintaining professional skepticism in an AI-driven environment.

Mayes, who was also on the podcast in February, reflects in this episode on the profession’s responsibility to prepare the next generation of CPAs and the energizing role events such as ENGAGE play in shaping new ideas across the profession.

One other resource related to the conversation: the monthly A&A Focus series.

What you’ll learn from this episode:

• An early-career lesson for Mayes that underscored CPAs serving as “gatekeepers for the capital markets.”
• What early stages of the Profession Ready Initiative have unearthed after conversations with more than 1,000 accounting professionals.
• Why communication skills, critical thinking, and skepticism are becoming more important in the age of AI.
• Why Mayes said, “Active listeners make better leaders.”
• How employers and educators are working to close competency gaps for CPAs.
• What ENGAGE means to accounting professionals looking for new ideas, stronger connections, and practical innovation.

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: Welcome to the Journal of Accountancy podcast, recording on-site at ENGAGE in Las Vegas. I’m your host, Neil Amato. This episode is with an AICPA executive on the organization’s Profession Ready Initiative, and you’ll hear the conversation after this sponsor message.

[Sponsor message]

Amato: Welcome back. Our guest at ENGAGE is Carl Mayes, the AICPA’s vice president–CPA Candidate Quality & Competency. Carl, I guess first I’m going to say, I believe this is the first time we’ve seen each other in person since early 2020, probably. It’s been a while, but welcome back, and we’re glad to see you and glad to have you on the JofA podcast.

Carl Mayes: It’s good to be back, Neil, and that’s crazy to think.

Amato: It really is. I mentioned your title. When we had a virtual conversation in February, I introduced you as VP, or vice president, of Candidate Quality & Competency. But since that time, you’ve had a change in title. What is that new title and role?

Mayes: Yes. Thanks. My new title is VP of Ethics & Firm Quality. I’m going to continue to have the Profession Ready Initiative. But, VP of Ethics & Firm Quality was Jim Brackens for a very long time. Jim was with the AICPA for 19 years, and I’ll be stepping in to that role. I’ll be overseeing the Ethics division, overseeing the Peer Review team, and helping Sue Coffey operationalize her strategy.

Amato: That’s great. You mentioned Jim Brackens in a LinkedIn comment, he said about you, “He shares my passion and love for this great profession.” I want to break that down a little bit. Tell me first about passion for the profession. Where for you did it start?

Mayes: That’s a great question. I worked for a small firm, a local firm in Raleigh early in my career, and I was uncertain on my career path at that point. And I went to our QC director and I asked her, why is what we do important, basically, as auditors? Her eyebrows shot up and she gave me this look like, are you insane? It’s incredibly important.

The way that she described it to me, we’re gatekeepers for the capital markets. So. auditors, assurance providers, members in corporate, accounting and finance – capital is allocated based on the work that we do, and the alternative is a lack of transparency and speculation.

It’s interesting. We had a recent news around a major fraud, and the fraud had to do with a bank that had lended a substantive amount of money, millions of dollars, to somebody who had not had an audit. And you know, it was kind of, I took him at his word, and I’m going to lend him this money, and I think that’s the risk. That’s why what we do is so important. The alternative is really 1929.

We fill an incredibly vital function in the economy and in society in general, and I’m just excited to be a part of it.

Amato: I mentioned that February discussion we had when our focus was the Profession Ready Initiative. What’s new with that initiative since we last spoke?

Mayes: A lot since February. We have three primary areas we’re focused on. We’re focused on research, we’re focused on supporting the academic community, and we’re focused on learning for employers. From a research perspective, we’ve finished some of our foundational work. We’ve identified some skill gaps that the next generation of CPAs or aspirant CPAs that employers are seeing, and that’s really an opportunity for us and an opportunity for employers to set them up for success because that’s so incredibly important.

We’ve identified some of those things. We have initial thoughts. We’re moving into what’s called the validation stage of that research, but the important thing is, we’re making progress from a research perspective.

With the academic community, we’ve started discussion groups around some of those gaps that I mentioned, and we’re hearing from educators on how they fill those gaps within their academic programs. And gathering resources and gathering insights through those discussions so that we can develop a resource center for all educators, focused on those areas.

Then from a learning perspective, we’ve gotten a really good understanding of what employers need. We’ve defined what we’re going to be building, who’s going to be working on it, and how we’re going to be rolling it out, so it’s very exciting.

Amato: As you talk about this validation process, what are some of the common themes emerging from the feedback you’re getting from members?

Mayes: What we ask members, and at this point I think we’ve talked with over 1,000 members, and that’s not surveys. We’ve actually talked with over 1,000 members at this point. Common themes, so debits and credits surprisingly. Almost every skill discussion that I’ve been a part of with, whether they’re tax experts or whether they’re experts in audit or whatever, they’re mentioning debits and credits, fundamental understanding of accrual accounting, and some things along those lines. We’re monitoring that.

I actually heard one head of learning say that for her staff, when they first come in, usually about 50% of them need remediation from a debits-and-credits perspective in order for them to be effective. That’s one of the things we’ve identified. Communication is probably No. 1, oral communication, written communication, professional communication, and understanding what’s appropriate in the circumstances, critical thinking and a skeptical mindset.

When you have a tool like AI that can serve you up an answer to just about any question, but you know that it hallucinates. Having that critical thinking, that skeptical mindset, is so incredibly important, and I think that just increases where we’re at today. We’ve also heard adaptability, having an owner mindset. Those are some of the themes that we’ve identified. The next step is to work on our learning solution with the educators to close those gaps.

Amato: You mentioned those interactions. If you’re going to have interactions that are beyond survey interactions, you have to be a good listener. What I’ll ask you personally is, do you consider yourself a good listener?

Mayes: I try to be. It’s such an incredibly important tool, active listening. It’s such a big part of emotional intelligence, and at least in my view, there has never been a time where it’s been more important than right now. Good listeners, active listeners make better leaders, they understand what their people need in order to be motivated, in order to be productive. They catch things that others don’t, so they catch opportunities and risks.

One of the things that the Rise2040 group has said came out of their discussions with 6,000 practitioners across the globe is the concept that you may hear the same theme over and over and over again, but then every once in a while, there’s one little nugget that only comes up once, you only hear it one time, and it’s the best thing that you heard the entire time.

One of those things was this concept of human in the lead for Rise2040, and that was only said one time, but they picked that up because of active listening. It’s so important. I also think it leads to building stronger relationships. Professional service firms, we work in a relationship business. It’s always been a key part of the profession. I just think it’s going to be more important as time goes on.

Amato: I’m going to go on a little soapbox here, but I think it’s harder than ever to be a good listener. Just think about our setting right now. I don’t know if the microphones pick it up, but we’ve got some background music playing. We’ve got a screen right in front of us that has four different TV networks and a commercial and a stock ticker, and we’ve got our phones and we’ve got chat. It is hard to be a good listener.

Mayes: It is hard, and it’s almost like we’re socialized to focus on the screen constantly. And that skill at active listening, that skill at having conversation and rooting out those opportunities, those risks, and so on from those conversations, I hope it’s not diminishing as part of that societal trend.

Amato: Thanks for allowing that detour. Getting back to the Profession Ready Initiative, why to you is it important? Perhaps how does it tie into another part of Jim Brackens’ comment about “this great profession”?

Mayes: It’s about setting the next generation of this profession up for success, and that is always an area that I think is exciting to work on. Can you imagine graduating today and being part of this generation where you’ve got some lingering effects from COVID? These kids lived through COVID, none of us can really understand the type of toll that that took on them in terms of skill development, competency development.

I was in-person a lot when I first graduated. Today, a lot of work is remote, and that can be harder. It can be harder to learn in that type of environment. Then with the uncertainty with AI, how that’s going to impact jobs, this generation does not have it easy. And the prospect of helping this next generation, we’re legitimately a great profession and we need to keep it that way. And that means the next generation, we need to meet them where they’re at, and we need to get them the skills and competencies that employers need so they can be successful.

Amato: Well said. To close it out, Carl, we’re recording from Las Vegas. It’s the 10th edition of ENGAGE. Being here, we’re just in the first few hours, but to me it’s been energizing, seeing so many members, seeing so many people I know in this profession. I’m sure the same for you. Can you put into words just what it’s like?

Mayes: I look forward to it all year. The sessions are the best. I get to see friends that I haven’t seen in forever. You and I just got to see each other for the first time in six years, which is awesome. You get to see fascinating products in the exhibit hall from up-and-coming vendors, and it realy influences the decisions and the thinking of leaders of organizations.

But I think it’s bigger than that. I think it’s a service overall to the profession and attendees are coming away thinking differently. Thinking differently about technical matters, about how they’re going to run their firm.

I will just give a quick little example, when we were looking for a new offering at the AICPA to engage with our A&A practice members, I attended an ENGAGE session on how to build and enhance engagement with your client base. It was hosted by some folks who had large social media followings, and I really didn’t know what I was going to get out of it. But ultimately, the insights that came from that session were the seeds that grew into A&A Focus.

For folks who aren’t familiar, A&A Focus has about 5,000 folks who attend on a monthly basis, and if you’re in the A&A space, encourage you to attend that. But that’s happening all across these halls right now, and it’s incredibly energizing to be a part of that.

Amato: That’s great. You mentioned A&A Focus. We’ll include a link to that monthly webcast in the show notes for this episode. We mentioned Profession Ready Initiative, we’ll include some of those links. Any other resources you’d like to bring people’s attention to as a closing thought to this episode?

Mayes: I think follow the links to A&A Focus and Profession Ready. We have a lot coming up in Profession Ready, and we would love folks who are interested in participating in focus groups, who are interested in learning more about the initiative to reach out to us. Definitely those two, reach out and let us know what you think, and we’re happy to follow up with you.

Amato: Carl Mayes, thank you for being on the podcast.

Mayes: Thanks a lot, Neil.