The other half of your talent strategy: Why accounting firms need intergenerational mentorship
When a 30-year partner retires, her judgment goes too. Here's why accounting firms are turning to intergenerational mentorship to protect their talent.
Tania has been with your firm for 31 years. She knows which clients prefer a call over an email. She knows how to read an anxious business owner. She knows where the figurative bodies are buried in every set of financials she's touched since 1995. She’s got three decades of deep and accumulated institutional knowledge.
Tania is retiring in 18 months. Does your firm have a plan for what happens to everything she knows?
The accounting profession is experiencing a genuine pipeline crisis, but the conversation almost always centers on recruitment. The deeper threat is the knowledge that walks out the door with every retiring partner.
A crisis in two parts
Here are the numbers:
The number of people sitting for the CPA exam has declined more than 30% since 2016.
Accounting graduates hit a new 20-year low.
CPA-credentialed roles now take an average of 73 days to fill, which is 41% longer than comparable positions without the designation.
At the same time as all of this, a generation of experienced partners is heading towards retirement.
Most talent strategies address the first part of this situation: the lack of new talent. But almost none of them address the second part.
Why recruiting harder won't be enough
The firms investing most heavily in recruiting today are solving a talent flow problem, rather than a depth problem.
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