Sheepskin Surge

While in college I made an itinerant stop at a local establishment that sold, ahem, adult beverages, (one of many during my quadrennial experiment in academic underachievement) and walked headlong into a rather testy exchange between the counter clerk and a middle-aged woman. The man apparently had bemoaned the fact that he was having trouble finding a full-time job and was being sternly lectured by the lady and the importance of preparing yourself for a career.

“So what have you been doing all these years?” she asked.

With perfect aplomb he responded, “Getting my Ph.D.”

I left before learning in what field he’d earned his doctorate, but fast forward several decades later and career worries appear at, or near the bottom of the list these days for accounting majors.

According to the American Institute of CPAs, hiring for accounting grads is at a record level as are the number of enrollments in accounting education.

In its report which can be found here, the institute found that some 40,350 accounting graduates were hired last year in public accounting, with nearly 90 percent of those firms forecasting the same or higher levels of hiring in 2013. Clearly accounting positions – as well as those in general finance – are in greater demand, than say, liquor store clerks with Ph.D.’s were in the early 1980s.

The paper reported a near 20 percent climb in the number of accounting graduates, with some 82,177 degrees bestowed on graduates during the 2011-2012 academic year. Both undergraduate and graduate enrollments are currently at the highest level in the 40-year history of the survey.

That trend segues nicely toward addressing the succession issue – or more accurately, succession crisis –currently impacting the profession today.

A dozen or so years ago, those enrollment and graduation statistics were not quite as rosy. The lure of the tech boom or a more lucrative career on Wall Street, most likely deprived the profession of many of today’s potential leaders as many accounting majors opted not to enter public accounting. Not that the profession at that point in time did much to help itself either – turning its major marketing efforts on promoting unimportant new designations or ancillary ventures.

But that was then and this is now.

Rarely a week goes by when some accounting-centric publication does not feature content focusing on the battle to recruit and retain talent and its subsequent effect on the succession pipeline that has now manifested itself in thousands of firms across the country.

The familiar whine of good help is hard to find in accounting is rapidly going the way of the Burroughs adding machine or the IBM 286. And firms that are unable to seize on this cascade of accounting capital will surely find themselves in the same antiquated heap as both of those long-forgotten devices.