MANAGEMENT

Accounting Internships Need an Upgrade | ARC

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As AI handles more routine work, how do young accountants develop judgment, communication and leadership?

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Accounting ARC
With Donny Shimamoto and Liz Mason
Center for Accounting Transformation

The accounting internship is due for an upgrade.

For decades, internships often give aspiring accountants their first real taste of the profession by dropping them into the work: Learn the process, complete the assignment, survive busy season and figure out the unwritten rules along the way.

But as artificial intelligence takes over more of the entry-level work traditionally assigned to new accountants, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, and Liz Mason, CPA, argue the profession needs to reconsider what an internship is actually supposed to teach.

MORE Accounting ARC: The CPA Career Nobody Talks About | Conference Season Exposes Accounting’s Knowledge Gap | The Feedback Mistake That Costs You Your Best People | Is Your Boss Really the Problem? | Most Accountants Are Missing This AI Shift | AI Can Fix Your Workflow—or Break It in Seconds | Efficiency Is the Wrong Goal for AI | Accounting’s Hidden Talent Risk: The Sandwich Generation | Built Fast. Sold Faster. Broken Later? The Truth About Accounting Tech | Recognize When You Need to Recharge Before You Burn Out | Valuing More Than the Balance Sheet

In this episode of the Accounting ARC podcast, Shimamoto, founder and managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies LLC and founder and inspiration architect for the Center for Accounting Transformation, and Mason, CEO of High Rock Accounting, explore why tomorrow’s accountants need more than technical proficiency.

They need what Shimamoto calls “power skills.”

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What Relevance Means for Staffing in Accounting

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Five young business people at work in an office setting.

Seventeen ways to improve.

By Marc Rosenberg
CPA Firm Staff: Managing Your #1 Asset

The business graveyard is littered with major organizations that missed the boat by failing to see cataclysmic game changers happening right before their eyes.

  • Ice companies failed to get into refrigeration because they saw themselves in the ice business.
  • Railroads missed out on autos and aerospace because they didn’t see themselves in the transportation business.
  • A CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation said he couldn’t imagine why people would want a computer in their own house.
  • It took the Wright Brothers five years to get the U.S. government to even talk to them about their invention.

MORE: How Accounting Staffing Has Changed
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In all fairness it’s extremely difficult, if not impossible, to anticipate and accept massive changes like these.
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You Have to Start Somewhere

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Wishful thinking won’t move you forward.

By Ed Mendlowitz
The 30:30 Training Method

Question: Thanks for the training memo. Although I requested your memo because I know I need help with improving efficiency and the like with my practice, many of your thoughts and ideas I have already thought of but simply did not implement them.

MORE: Two Options for Collecting Past Due Fees | You Can’t Win with Lowballing | Yes, You Have to Share Work Papers | Should You Merge? Here’s How to Chart Your Path | Hold Staff Accountable If You Want Them to Listen to You | How to Raise Your Rates | Higher Fees to Start: Ten Ways to Make Your Tax Season Better | Three Ways to Start an Accounting Practice | Free Consultation? Not Always | Referral Fee? Forget It
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Response: I think you hit part of the nail on the head in what you wrote – you’ve had many of the ideas and “simply did not implement them.”
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Mandy Gallagher: Caregiving Isn’t a Side Issue – It’s a Workforce Issue | MOVE Like This

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“Flexibility should be used as a tool for success. It shouldn’t be the exception.” 

This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here
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Optimize Profits, Delight Clients, & Build a Top-Value Firm!

MOVE Like This
With Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk
For CPA Trendlines Research

In this episode of MOVE Like This, Mandy Gallagher, lead manager of Women’s Initiatives at the AICPA, joins Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk to discuss why caregiving has become such an important conversation in accounting, what firms may misunderstand about caregivers, and how greater flexibility and support could influence retention and leadership pipelines across the profession. Gallagher’s work focuses on advancing women’s initiatives, supporting professional development, and amplifying women’s perspectives throughout the profession. 

 

MORE MOVE Like This | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

One reason caregiving is getting more attention now is that it is both more visible and much broader than many people have traditionally assumed. Demographic shifts mean multiple generations are simultaneously balancing careers with responsibilities for children, aging parents, siblings, partners, friends, and others who rely on them. COVID also changed expectations around where and how work can happen. Employees experienced firsthand that they could remain productive while having enough flexibility to pick up a child or take a parent to a medical appointment. As more organizations return to traditional office expectations, those competing demands have become harder to reconcile.

 

The conversation challenges another long-standing assumption: that caregiving is primarily a women-with-young-children issue.

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How Accounting Staffing Has Changed

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Businesswoman sitting on table while talking with four coworkers

And two major drivers of that change.

By Marc Rosenberg
CPA Firm Staff: Managing Your #1 Asset

“Treat people as they are and they will remain as they are. Treat people as they can be and should be and they will become as they can and should be.” – Goethe

“You see, really and truly, apart from the things anyone can pick up, such as dressing and the proper way of speaking and so on, the difference between a lady and a flower girl is not how she behaves, but how she’s treated. I shall always be a flower girl to Professor Higgins, because he always treats me as a flower girl. But I know I can be a lady to you, Colonel Pickering, because you always treat me as a lady and always will.” – Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady”

MORE: Thirteen Traits of Partners You’ll Want to Keep | Six Rules for Keeping Partners Happy and Productive | Why Strategic Thinking Impacts Your Firm’s Future | Seven Things Good Firms Must Do | Five Ways to Separate Accounting Winners from Losers | Two Factors Determine Firm Profitability | Don’t Make Firm Profitability a Goal | Core Values: Why Your Firm Needs Them | Five Keys in Compensating New Managing Partners | Top 20 Tough Choices for the Partner Comp Committee | Voting on Ownership Basis? Three Better Methods | What Partners Do and Don’t Deserve
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The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said: “There is nothing permanent except change.” People fly and drive cars instead of using horses and carts. Technology has replaced calculators, slide rules and the process for writing books. Food is purchased at grocery stores instead of grown on farms.

Drastic changes have occurred in the CPA industry as well. One of the biggest areas of change is how staff are managed and treated, as shown by this chart.
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