TALENT & CAREER DEVELOPMENT

Tony Wilson: Career Options CPAs May Be Overlooking | Accounting Conversations

By

Extraordinary opportunities lie ahead for those who combine accounting knowledge with curiosity, judgment, and business insight.

Sponsored by Radical Pricing by the Radical CPA, Jody Padar | See Today’s Special Offer

Subscribe to CPA Trendlines podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google/YouTube, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music, Audible, Player FM, Audacy, RSS.

Optimize Profits, Delight Clients, & Build a Top-Value Firm!

Accounting Conversations
With Chayton Farlee
Center for Accounting Transformation

Accounting students often feel pressure to choose the perfect career path before they have taken their first professional step. Tony Wilson, CPA, CMA, offers a more forgiving — and practical — approach: Choose a direction, start moving, and learn along the way.

“Sometimes, just choose the thing,” Wilson says. “Just go after it.”

In this episode of the Accounting Conversations Podcast, host Chayton Farlee, an assurance associate at CliftonLarsonAllen, talks with Wilson, founder of Accquip, about building a career that stretches from public accounting and corporate finance to entrepreneurship and fractional CFO services.

MORE Center for Accounting Transformation | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

Along the way, Wilson shares candid advice for students and early-career accountants who want to gain meaningful experience, prepare for firm ownership, and understand where they can create value in a profession transformed by technology.

READ MORE →

Donny Shimamoto: Build Careers That Bend, Not Break | MOVE Like This

By

Flexible systems help accounting professionals remain, contribute, and advance when life’s responsibilities change.

This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here
Sponsored by Radical Pricing by Jody Padar, CPA | See Today’s Special Offer

Subscribe to CPA Trendlines Research podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google/YouTube, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music, Audible, Player FM, Audacy, RSS.

Optimize Profits, Delight Clients, & Build a Top-Value Firm!

MOVE Like This
With Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk
For CPA Trendlines Research

When caregiving responsibilities collide with work, even the most committed professionals can find themselves questioning whether their careers are still sustainable.

In this episode of MOVE Like This, Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies and inspiration architect at the Center for Accounting Transformation, joins Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk to discuss what accounting firms can do to better support employees with caregiving responsibilities. Drawing from his own experience as a caregiver and his firm’s long-standing flexible work model, Shimamoto explains why supporting caregivers isn’t about creating complicated new policies. Instead, it’s about building thoughtful systems, training managers, and planning work in ways that recognize employees have lives outside the office.

MORE MOVE Like This | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

Shimamoto shares how becoming a caregiver for his great-aunt changed his own perspective on the issue. While many people associate caregiving with raising young children, his experience highlighted how responsibilities for aging parents, relatives, and others often arrive unexpectedly and affect employees across every stage of their careers. Rather than viewing caregiving as a temporary accommodation for a small group of employees, he believes firms should recognize it as a reality that will affect nearly everyone at some point in their lives.

That shift in thinking changes how organizations design policies, manage workloads, and retain experienced professionals.

READ MORE →

Who Will Review Tax Returns When AI Trains No One? | ARC

By

Firms must build new pathways that develop reviewers, judgment and client-facing skills.

 

Sponsored by Radical Pricing by the Radical CPA, Jody Padar | See Today’s Special Offer

Subscribe to CPA Trendlines podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google/YouTube, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music, Audible, Player FM, Audacy, RSS.

Optimize Profits, Delight Clients, & Build a Top-Value Firm!

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

Artificial intelligence may not eliminate the entry-level tax professional. But it is dismantling the job that many firms still use to train one.

That’s the conversation driving a new episode of the Accounting ARC podcast featuring Donny Shimamoto, CPA.CITP, CGMA, founder and managing director of IntrapriseTechKnowlogies LLC and founder and inspiration architect for the Center for Accounting Transformation; and Liz Mason, CPA, CEO of High Rock Accounting.

The conversation begins with a small tax firm that hires six interns each year and teaches them to prepare returns much as earlier generations learned: working from paper documents, identifying relevant numbers, mapping those figures to tax forms, and entering the data into tax software.

MORE Accounting ARC: Accounting Internships Need an Upgrade | 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

The firm owner sees the process as an apprenticeship that helps students bridge the gap between an individual tax course and real-world preparation. Shimamoto sees value in teaching interns how information moves from source documents to a completed return. Mason agrees with the objective but challenges the method.

“From a holistic learning exploration, sure, yes, that is a way to learn,” Mason says. “From a where-we-are-today perspective, I think that’s a giant disservice to these interns.”

READ MORE →

Lynnette Oss Connell: Your Staff Want to Lead—But Not Like This | The Disruptors

By

Burnout is not a personal failure. It’s a nervous system signal.
Sponsored by True Advisor: The Definitive Success Guide for Client Advisory Services by Hitendra Patil

The Disruptors
With Liz Farr
For CPA Trendlines

True Advisor: Buy now | Learn more

Young accountants still want to become leaders. They just don’t want to work the way many of today’s leaders do.

A 2026 KPMG intern survey cited by burnout coach Lynnette Oss Connell finds 92% of interns aspire to reach the C-suite or another senior executive role. Yet the workplace behavior they most want eliminated is an “always-available” culture.

MORE Disruptors with Liz Farr | CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

For accounting firms worried about keeping their next generation of managers and partners, Oss Connell says younger professionals hear firms encouraging boundaries and work-life balance while watching managers and partners remain constantly connected, work long hours and push through stress.

READ MORE →

Leah Yoneda: Future Partners Need More Than a Networking Script | MOVE Like This

By

Sustainable growth comes from cultivating trust over time—not collecting contacts, memorizing sales scripts or forcing professionals into uncomfortable networking routines.

This is a preview. The complete 1-hour video episode, with commentary and transcript, is first available exclusively to PRO Members | Go PRO here
Sponsored by Radical Pricing by Jody Padar, CPA | See Today’s Special Offer
Subscribe to CPA Trendlines Research podcasts anywhere: Apple, Google/YouTube, Spotify, iHeart, Deezer, Amazon Music, Audible, Player FM, Audacy, RSS.

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, Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk sits down with Leah Yoneda, founder and CEO of Golden Ginkgo Group, to explore why so many talented accounting professionals struggle with business development and why the problem often has less to do with personality than with how firms define, teach, and reward growth.

Yoneda argues that firms frequently wait until professionals are on the doorstep of partnership before introducing business development, then expect them to master an entirely different skill set with little guidance or support.

MORE MOVE Like This | MORE CPA Trendlines Streaming Network

Rather than treating relationship building as a long-term professional competency, many firms reduce it to a one-time training session or a list of networking tactics. She believes this approach sets professionals up for unnecessary stress and overlooks the fact that meaningful business development takes years to develop.

A significant portion of the conversation focuses on introversion and the misconceptions surrounding it.

READ MORE →