Flipping the Script: How CPAs Can Rewrite the Profession’s Story

Last year, the Chicago White Sox wanted to hire an accounting manager. A first attempt netted 50 resumes but zero qualified applicants. The job was posted again, and the team finally landed a great candidate, but Mallory Penn, CPA, senior director of accounting for the White Sox, admits she was getting nervous. “I was a little surprised that we weren’t batting people away,” she says. “We’re a professional sports team—I thought we’d get hundreds of resumes!” So, if a professional sports team is struggling to attract accounting talent, what does that mean for everyone else? Neema Parikh, recruiting manager at Topel Forman, says the stakes are high as the pipeline for qualified candidates becomes more condensed: “The pipeline remains the profession’s biggest hurdle, and it trickles up—from entry-level recruits to experienced professionals. We need to help people understand that this is an amazing profession to come into and then stay in.”

Recognizing these concerns, the newly formed National Pipeline Advisory Group released its “Accounting Talent Strategy Report” in July 2024, detailing six strategies to help address the accounting talent shortage. Among the strategies—telling a more compelling story about accounting careers.

CPAs in particular can help lead the way in this charge to better attract and engage talent and support the pipeline.

Sharing the Good Story

Recently, Mark Wolfgram, CPA, MST, tax director at Bel Brands USA Inc., started to notice something: The first thing CPAs do when they get together is discuss how hard they’re working. “We always lead with that, and it’s not something that endears the profession to the young people we’re trying to keep,” he notes.

Jonathan Hauser, CPA, a partner in KPMG’s business tax services practice, noticed the same trend. “It’s our default as humans,” he says. “We focus on the hard things because it’s viewed as a badge of honor, but we don’t talk equally about the tremendous opportunities in this profession. Accounting professionals work hard, but the long hours are tempered with flexibility, interesting work, and many different career paths. So, rather than telling our war stories, we need to tell our glory stories.”

For Hauser, his glory story centers around the flexibility he’s incorporated into his own life over the course of his career. He emphasizes that flexibility isn’t only available to partners. “I was a senior-level staff member when my first son was born,” he says. “My hours were flexible and allowed me to do what I needed to do on a personal level and get my work finished to meet deadlines.”

Wolfgram says reframing the narrative in everyday conversations can go a long way. For example, when someone asks how he’s doing, instead of responding with how busy he is, he describes the good work he’s actually doing. His most recent response:

“I traveled to Paris, New York, and Washington, D.C. and worked with people in two different languages to file an application between the United States and French governments to determine how much profit each government gets to share. It was incredibly interesting, and I was able to enjoy spending time in each of those cities. This project has helped me grow as a professional, learn new things, and get better every day.”

Hauser says another part of the profession’s story must include how technology and artificial intelligence are being used to improve employees’ career trajectories: “These tools allow individuals to feel like they didn’t spend four years in school just to calculate depreciation. Now, people can leverage their leadership training and technical skills to work with clients and build their toolboxes through experience. Technology is providing new opportunities— let’s tell people about that.”

Another important story to share is how CPAs’ unique skill sets allow them to give back to their communities in countless ways. Wolfgram says it’s a key issue for today’s young professionals, one that he often underestimates. “It can give a more meaningful experience to your life to know what you do makes a difference, and it’s probably the profession’s most underrated thing.”

Hitting a Career Home Run

Perhaps another underrated or underestimated highlight of the CPA profession is the ability to align your personal interests with your career.

While Penn admits she could be doing accounting and finance functions for any organization, working for one of the nation’s oldest professional baseball teams—the Chicago White Sox—is a childhood dream.

As a lifelong White Sox fan, Penn shares that working for the organization brings unique and fun everyday interactions and experiences, including walking through the tunnel leading to the players’ clubhouse and crossing paths with team members, working with members of the player development department who are often former professional baseball players themselves, conducting a financial analysis of a new sponsorship deal, training scouts to use a new expense reporting tool, or helping the groundskeeper with his budget.

“I love interacting with all of these people from different backgrounds,” Penn says. “Our accounting team does everything from budgeting to tax reporting to financial accounting to analysis, and I participate in things I wouldn’t get to do in a segmented corporate environment.”

What’s more, while the team’s baseball department handles the actual salary negotiations, Penn and her department are deeply involved from a budgeting and forecasting perspective. “We look at the organization’s bottom line to provide guidance to ownership and baseball leadership so they know what our financial position looks like,” she says.

Specifically, Penn recalls one notable off season where salary negotiations involved several big-name players (i.e., big salaries): “We had to forecast what it would look like to sign someone with a really big salary. We analyzed whether we could make that money back through better attendance or ticket sales. Everything we do is for the team on the field.”

But it’s on White Sox game days when the reality of working for a historic sports team really hits her: “There’s a Major League Baseball game going on just outside my office walls, and I can go watch a couple of innings at lunch!”

An Open Door of Possibilities

Martrice Caldwell, CPA, says earning her CPA credential opened many doors for her career: from the outset of her career in public accounting to spending more than 15 years in the nonprofit sector to now serving as controller for the Chicago Fire Football Club.

While Caldwell hadn’t necessarily pictured herself in the sports world at any point in her career, someone in her professional network forwarded her the controller position description, and it turned out Caldwell knew the chief financial officer. “Yes, I was in the right place at the right time, but I also had the experience,” Caldwell says. “I had been growing my network, and I thought, ‘Why not me?’”

When Caldwell joined the Chicago Fire two years ago, she says there was definitely a learning curve. She knew how to write up the five-step process of revenue recognition, but now she needed to apply it to ticket sales, player transfer fees, sponsorships, and merchandise sales. She quickly learned how and why things are done the way they are for a professional sports team.

Like Penn, working for a professional sports team allows for interesting, unique work that most don’t get a chance to see up close. While Caldwell isn’t part of the salary negotiations themselves, her team helps those who are doing the negotiating understand the financial implications of roster decisions to ensure compliance with Major League Soccer (MLS) roster rules. MLS players are employed by the league rather than being paid by the team itself, creating complexities that must be carefully accounted for.

“We develop our rosters based on these rules, and it occasionally involves players who’ve been transferred from other leagues or clubs,” she says. “There can be transfer fees associated with player movement. The intricacies around those transactions and how they follow accounting principles are so interesting. We determine how to account for revenue and expenses in these different scenarios, and then we explain our processes to auditors.”

Being Genuine, Flexible

Although sharing the everyday good stories, like those of Penn and Caldwell, are a must for the profession, burying some of the profession’s problems isn’t going to help either. Experts warn that behind every good story there also needs to be the genuine truth.

“Young people are savvy,” Wolfgram cautions. “If we’re only producing social media posts and content that positively depict the profession, but then a student attends a Beta Alpha Psi meeting and hears from young professionals whose real-life stories don’t align, they’ll see right through it. There’s a difference between telling a good story and living it.”

Parikh says Topel Forman’s policy is to be very upfront with its staff about the hours and time commitments required of them, but they’ll work with their staff to balance their lives: “Our partners are dedicated to helping staff find their balance. Life happens. People get married. They get sick. The marketplace has shifted, and candidates are looking for that flexibility. I think public accounting firms have come a long way.”

For Wolfgram, he’s making sure to walk the talk with his own corporate finance team: “I’m trying to give them the opportunities to have the flexibility I enjoy—not just by saying I believe in it, but by letting them do it. That means if someone has a family event, I’m not going to call them about a tax return. These are the types of things that I can do personally without waiting for things to change on a bigger scale.”

Communicating a Lifetime of Benefits

Overall, Hauser calls potential solutions to the pipeline challenge a three-way street that involves: 1) employers doing a better job of helping employees avoid burnout, 2) employees owning their schedules and setting boundaries, and 3) managing client expectations—what needs to be completed today versus tomorrow.

“It’s tough to get the balance right, but we need to be focused on all three of these things,” he stresses. “Let’s take a step back, figure out how to help people live their lives, and share the good story.”

As he listens to conversations about the pipeline challenges, Wolfgram says his main takeaway is there’s no silver bullet that one person, firm, or organization can do to solve the problem: “But that doesn’t mean we give in. We’re problem solvers. We need to continue to do the best we can to solve this, and everyone can do it by tweaking their mindset.”

Caldwell adds: “Yes, accounting is demanding, and programs can be challenging, but you get to chart your own path. I don’t know anywhere else you can do that. Those are the kinds of messages we need to share.”

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