Ask how to elevate your career and make a difference.

TLDR:

Barry Melancon, the longtime president and CEO of the AICPA, will be retiring after 30 years. The accounting profession needs to focus on attracting and retaining young professionals. Accountants and CPAs can help by changing how they talk about the profession, offering career development support, and signing up for the NPAG’s Pipeline Pledge.

Key Elements:

• Barry Melancon is retiring after 30 years as president and CEO of the AICPA.
• The accounting profession needs to focus on attracting and retaining young professionals.
• Accountants and CPAs can help by changing how they talk about the profession and offering career development support.
• Signing up for the NPAG’s Pipeline Pledge demonstrates commitment to growing the profession.

By now, you will probably have heard that Barry Melancon, the longtime president and CEO of the American Institute of CPAs, will be retiring at the end of this year, after 30 years of leading the accounting profession through the greatest period of change and disruption it has ever known. It’s common at times like these to revisit a major leader’s contributions; Melancon’s are certainly myriad, and over the next several months, we’ll be diving into the huge legacy that he will bequeath to the accounting profession.

Currently, the most important thing that accountants and CPAs can do is to make sure that there actually is a next generation of professionals — a task whose outlines were made clear in the recent report by the National Pipeline Advisory Group, which has spent a year studying the cause of, and potential solutions to, the dearth of young people choosing to pursue careers in accounting. While the group has plenty of assignments for regulators, academics, membership organizations and others, its report makes it very clear that a lot of the heavy lifting of fixing the talent shortage will come down to firm owners, employers, and individual accountants.

To start, you need to change the way you talk about the profession, and to talk more — and more positively — about it with young people. You need to offer more career development support. You also need to pay people more. There are plenty of other ways to contribute, and one great way to start is to sign up for the NPAG’s Pipeline Pledge to show your commitment to growing the profession.