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. That’s only appropriate, with an announcement like this giving us all cause to reflect on everything he’s done for the field. But today, I want it to give us cause to reflect on what the rest of us have done for the field.
After all, the members of a profession each have a responsibility to help it grow, and to do their part to leave it in robust shape for the next generation of professionals. 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.
You, in short.
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 (available at
To be sure, no one is expecting every CPA out there to demonstrate the same level of devotion as Melancon, who has famously said that his first thought every day when he wakes up is what he can do to make the profession better — but on the other hand, this is a problem that can’t be solved solely at the leadership level. It requires everyone in the profession to play their part.
Melancon has done a tremendous job over the past three decades shaping the profession for the next generation of accountants; whether there will be a next generation of accountants is, in many ways, up to the rest of us.
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