TALENT & CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Elliott: Embrace the ‘Dimension of Possible’ | MOVE Like This

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The profession’s newest partners may be the most vulnerable.

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MOVE Like This
With Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk
For CPA Trendlines

MOVE Like This host Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk sits down with Sarah Elliott, CPA, co-founder of Intend2Lead, to unpack what conscious leadership looks like in accounting—and why the profession’s newest partners may be the most vulnerable leaders in the firm.

Elliott, a former audit partner who left public accounting in 2014 to become an executive coach, argues that real change happens in a precise order: mindset, then skill set, then habits. Her “conscious leader” model centers on leaders who share power, elevate others, and stay curious, even when uncertainty invites fear.

“Our best leaders are human-centric first,” Elliott says. “In a world of accelerating tech and change, we have to start with people—always.”

MORE MOVE

Intend2Lead recently surveyed 110 newly promoted partners (2023–2024). The results spotlight avoidable gaps that push rising leaders toward burnout—or out of public accounting altogether.
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Toxic Partners Kill Your Firm’s Future | Accounting Influencers

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Gen Z won’t fix your firm culture problem – they’ll leave it.

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Accounting Influencers
With Rob Brown

When the youngest professionals in accounting start saying “no,” leaders should start listening.

In this episode of Accounting Influencers, the conversation turns to the one thing that could make or break your firm’s future: how you treat your people, specifically, how you treat Gen Z.

They’re qualified. They’re confident. And they’ve watched what the generations before them endured—burnout, long hours, micromanagement, and “be grateful you’ve got a job” culture. Their conclusion? “No thanks.”

This isn’t softness. It’s a strategy.

Gen Z values mental health over martyrdom, meaning over money, and culture over compensation. They’ve seen the toll that toxic leadership takes, and they’re unwilling to sacrifice well-being for tradition.

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Stay or Go? Rethink Job Hopping | Accounting Influencers

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Is the next big opportunity across the street…or right where you already are?

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Accounting Influencers
With Rob Brown

Post-pandemic, accounting professionals saw record pay increases just for changing employers.

However, as economic conditions tighten and median pay raises for job switchers fall from roughly 7% to just over 4%, the calculus is changing. The latest episode of the Accounting Influencers explores this new reality, urging professionals to look beyond paychecks and consider the broader picture of career satisfaction.

During the Great Resignation, switching jobs was practically risk-free. Firms desperate for talent offered 15–20% salary hikes to fill open seats. Today, however, that market has cooled. With inflation steadying and corporate budgets tightening, job hopping no longer guarantees the big payouts it once did.

As host Rob Brown explains, “The financial upside of switching jobs has narrowed, but the emotional and professional costs of moving may be higher than ever.”

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Create an Accountability Chart for Your Firm

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It beats an org chart and here’s why.

By Jody Grunden
Building the Virtual CFO Firm in the Cloud

“Getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats – these are all crucial steps in the early stages of buildup…” – Jim Collins, “Good to Great”

When Adam and I first started the company, we didn’t have much organizational structure. We didn’t need it. But as the company grew, it became necessary to develop an organizational structure. There’s a great quote by Michael E. Gerber in his book “The E-Myth Revisited” that says, “Without the Organization Chart, confusion, discord and conflict become the order of the day.”

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We got to a point where we realized that Adam and I didn’t have clarity around our individual roles, and we were overlapping one another. We needed to have clearly defined roles for one another as well as the people who were working for us. Lack of clarity can cause a loss in production.
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Four Traits That Great Accounting Firm Leaders Share

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key leadership attributes

BONUS: Questions for self-assessment.

By Anthony Zecca
Leading from the Edge

As the leader of the firm, as important as it is to complete a comprehensive assessment of your leadership team, it is equally if not more critical to assess your own leadership. What are the key leadership attributes that reflect great Edge leadership?

MORE by Anthony Zecca
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How can you get a meaningful and comprehensive assessment of how well you are doing as the leader of the firm? The trap to avoid is to just listen to yourself and your own self-assessment. To really understand how well you are performing, you need multiple checkpoints.
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The $100,000 H-1B Shock: What It Means for Accounting Talent

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What changes, what doesn’t, for thousands of jobs in accounting.

In tax and audit in 2024, increases in salary bands were far from evenly distributed.

By Dominic Piscopo

I just consumed hours of H-1B visa content, so you don’t have to. Here are my findings.

Accounting isn’t the heaviest H-1B user (That’s IT & Tech.), but the profession still relies on international grads in audit, tax, advisory, and increasingly data and automation roles. In 2024, USCIS approved around 400k H-1Bs overall, with 2% to 3% of those in categories that could include accounting. So, while other industries are far more reliant on this program, there may still be thousands of roles in accounting. READ MORE →

Cash Bags, Casinos & Audits: How First Jobs Shape Us | ARC

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“As an auditor, you learn how non-financial events end up having a financial impact.”

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Plus, join Rory next week for Holistic Wealth Management: Modern CPA Opportunities.

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Accounting ARC
With Liz Mason, Byron Patrick, and Donny Shimamoto
Center for Accounting Transformation

On this episode of Accounting ARC, Liz Mason, CPA; Byron Patrick, CPA.CITP, CGMA; and Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, revisit their first accounting jobs. The conversation underscores how early exposure to operations, technology, and industry economics cultivates the judgment accountants need to interpret business realities.

MORE Accounting ARC: Gen Z Redefines Careers | Bootleggers, Baptitsts & CPAs: Rethinking Licensure |CPA Firm Ownership Under Fire | Walking Violation: When Showing Your CPA Gets You in Trouble | Audit Bags to TikTok Tags, Gen Z Talks Success | Students Challenge Accounting’s Traditional Career Path | True Grit: Recognizing Struggles That Shape Our Successes | More Admins, Fewer Students, No Plan | What Career Advice Gets Wrong for Gen Z – And How to Fix It |Your Identity is Not a Liability | What Happens in Vegas… Gets Reported on a Tax Return | Burnout, Be Gone: Accounting Needs a Boundary Breakthrough | The Ultimate Business Hack You’re Probably Ignoring | Resilience, Real Talk, and the Road to Mental Wellness | Blockchain Could Still Reshape Accounting | What Gen Z Wants from Business | Firm Differentiation Depends Upon Client Service

From hustling down the beach with bags of money to deploying field laptops with new tech to counting millions of dollars over 15 hours, each host shares a unique accounting beginning, but all have the same clear messaging.

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Get the Right People on the Bus

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people gathering in the shape of an arrowShift from serving clients to serving and developing leaders.

By Jody Grunden
Building the Virtual CFO Firm in the Cloud

“Once you recognize that the purpose of your life is not to serve your business, but that the primary purpose of your business is to serve your life, you can then go to work on your business, rather than in it, with a full understanding of why it is absolutely necessary for you to do so.” – Michael E. Gerber, “The E-Myth Revisited”

MORE by Jody Grunden
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As our team was growing and we reached over 30 team members, we recognized the need to establish a formal leadership team. When we were smaller, it worked fine for Adam and me to be the primary decision makers, but as our client base and workload grew, we realized we would become a bottleneck and slow things down. At that point, we made a conscious effort to transition our daily tasks and client responsibilities to other team members so we could remove ourselves from the weeds and focus on the higher-level view of the company.
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Gen Z Redefines Careers | ARC-SLC

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Students push for networking, compensation clarity, and creativity as the path to success in a changing profession.

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Not Your Headcount

Accounting ARC – Student-Led Conversations
With Chayton Farlee
Center for Accounting Transformation

When Dominic Piscopo, CPA, compared his first Big 4 paycheck to his weekend bartending income, he had one reaction: disbelief. “I clocked 100 hours during busy season, and the check wasn’t much different than what I made in two nights at the bar,” he recalls.

MORE Accounting ARC: Bootleggers, Baptists, & CPAs: Rethinking Licensure | CPA Firm Ownership Under Fire | Walking Violation: When Showing Your CPA Gets You in Trouble | Audit Bags to TikTok Tags, Gen Z Talks Success | Students Challenge Accounting’s Traditional Career Path | True Grit: Recognizing Struggles That Shape Our Successes | More Admins, Fewer Students, No Plan | What Career Advice Gets Wrong for Gen Z – And How to Fix It |Your Identity is Not a Liability | What Happens in Vegas… Gets Reported on a Tax Return | Burnout, Be Gone: Accounting Needs a Boundary Breakthrough | The Ultimate Business Hack You’re Probably Ignoring | Resilience, Real Talk, and the Road to Mental Wellness | Blockchain Could Still Reshape Accounting | What Gen Z Wants from Business | Firm Differentiation Depends Upon Client Service

Instead of shrugging it off, Piscopo started asking questions—lots of them. He gathered salary data from peers across firms and discovered his cohort was underpaid compared to the market. Presenting the numbers to leadership, he helped secure a nearly 10% raise for his entire group.

“That was the moment I realized transparency could change the profession,” Piscopo says.

Piscopo shares the story on Accounting ARC: Student-Led Conversations, hosted by accounting student Chayton Farlee. The two explore how networking, pay transparency, and building side projects can help students and young professionals stand out in an industry struggling to recruit and retain talent.

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Are Automation and AI Killing Entry-Level Jobs?

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Where the jobs aren’t.

By CPA Trendlines Research

The tax and accounting sector is shedding more jobs, with women and nonsupervisory workers feeling the brunt of the decline.

MORE STAFFING & RECRUITING | How DiSC Profiles Help Remote Teams | Meet Your New Boss: Gen Z | Accounting Influencers |  Kassi Rushing: Leadership Gaps, Not Motivation Gaps, Hold Firms Back | Gear Up For Growth

A new analysis by CPA Trendlines reveals the profession may be holding headcounts near historic highs but gradually reshaping itself. Women hold 62.1 percent of jobs, down from 63.4 percent a year ago — the sharpest one-year drop in female workforce share since 2010. Supervisory staff, meanwhile, make up 9.7 percent of total employment, up from 9.3 percent last year, reflecting a slow but steady increase in managerial presence, while nonsupervisory employment is down 3.6% year over year. READ MORE →

Five Checkpoints on Facing Challenges

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They’re inevitable, so be prepared.

By Martin Bissett
Passport to Partnership

When challenges come our way, regardless of what shape or form they arrive in, our world seems to lose a bit of brightness, there’s a little knot in the gut and a sense of peace broken.

MORE by Martin Bissett
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The question is, if we were watching our own responses to these trials, would we appoint ourselves as the next partner of the firm?

Let’s examine five checkpoints to test your own, or your staffers’, abilities to overcome challenges.
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Kassi Rushing: Leadership Gaps, Not Motivation Gaps, Hold Firms Back | Gear Up For Growth

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Developing “power skills” like trust and coaching are critical.

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Gear Up for Growth
With Jean Caragher
For CPA Trendlines

Employee experience is no longer optional; it’s a strategic imperative, says Kassi Rushing, CEO and owner of Kassi Rushing Consulting. Appearing on Gear Up for Growth—hosted by Jean Caragher, president of Capstone Marketing, and powered by CPA Trendlines—Rushing shares practical insights for firms aiming to attract and retain top talent.

More Gear Up for Growth here. | More Jean Caragher here | Get her best-selling handbook, The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms, here | More CPA Trendlines videos and podcasts here

The episode highlights two critical shifts firms must embrace:

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Waga: Storytelling Drives Recruiting | Gear Up for Growth

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Connect to top talent with real experiences.

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Gear Up for Growth
With Jean Caragher
For CPA Trendlines

In the latest episode of Gear Up for Growth, powered by CPA Trendlines, Jean Caragher, president of Capstone Marketing, speaks with Karen Waga, chief marketing officer of WilkinGuttenplan CPAs & Advisors, about the firm’s award-winning recruiting campaign, which resonated deeply with job seekers, employees, and peers across the profession.

More Gear Up for Growth here. | More Jean Caragher here | Get her best-selling handbook, The 90-Day Marketing Plan for CPA Firms, here | More CPA Trendlines videos and podcasts here

Waga says the campaign was built entirely on real employee experiences and candid storytelling, leveraging the firm’s flexible, people-first culture. The campaign offered a compelling and authentic view of life at WilkinGuttenplan from summer Fridays to paternity leave and personal caregiving.

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