MOVE Announces Best Firms for Women, Best Firms for Equity Leadership
Pinched between immediate capacity shortfalls and applying talent to innovation, firms are crafting new ways to recognize and reward women’s resilience.
By Bonnie Buol Ruszcyk
You can’t go the distance on an empty tank.
It takes pacing, re-fueling and constant systems checks to achieve long-term goals, for both accounting and advisory firms and women in the profession. Individual career sustainability is essential for firm growth – and vice versa.
In the recently released 2023 Accounting MOVE Project report, a talent-starved profession receives a fresh influx of strategies and inspiration for investing in the women it must attract and retain to achieve short goals and survive long-term. With nearly 75% of accounting firm leaders eligible for retirement, and accounting degree college enrollment continuing to drop, the profession is at a crossroads. It is more important than ever for firms to find ways to attract and retain employees to not only meet increasing client needs, but to simply survive. So, what are firms that are outpacing the industry doing differently?
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The Accounting MOVE Project report finds firms embracing the new super skill of career sustainability are rising to the occasion. For women, career sustainability addresses the capacity to maintain motivation and energy at every step, while rebalancing the personal and professional with each engagement. For firms, it engenders a leadership culture, defining new capabilities, qualifications, and measurements for unmapped growth. And for both, this super skill is the ability to “skate to where the puck is” on slanted ice through upended physics. Through it all, mutual respect and collaboration remains paramount, the inescapable legacy of the workplace upheaval brought on by the pandemic.
