Getting your CPA is like Making a Pizza

On a recent episode of The Accounting Podcast with David Leary and Blake Oliver, CPA, their guest David Knoble used the pizza making process as a metaphor for the path to becoming a CPA.

🤢 If the CPA is really like making a pizza, we must be talking about an Anchovy pizza, because a lot of students are turned off.

⚠ If you haven’t been following, the accounting profession is in a code red right now.

🎓 College students are choosing other areas of study that provide for a more lucrative career with better WLB, while at the same time avoiding extra education and grueling exams.

🏃‍♂️ Students are voting with their feet and they got the attention of the AICPA and the old guard in the accounting profession. It’s forcing a rethinking of what it takes to become a CPA.

The two most obvious levers to pull are modifying the work experience requirement and the extra 30 credit hours it takes to become a CPA.

🕜 Today, the extra 30 credit hours could be in any field of study, mine was in film studies. I wouldn’t say my analysis of Alien vs. Predator was essential learning. It seems more like a money grab by higher education than anything else.

🏋‍♂️ The 1 year of work experience can also be satisfied with time spent doing the simplest accounting tasks. It’s such a low bar you might as well remove it.

Other rules are just outright mean. Like putting an expiration date on the exams that you passed. What is this, a coupon for the local Piggly Wiggly or something?

⚡ I’m oversimplifying things a little bit, but “the powers that be” need to pressure test what is truly essential for certification.  

🧓 Unfortunately though, there are tons of existing CPA’s that were forced to do things the old way and will resist change. We have to practice what we preach to interns and associates.

⚰ As a profession we need to move on from that SALY line of thinking.

We have to be willing to change. The most experienced CPA’s took a single exam. You can debate for hours if it was easier or harder back in the day, but the point is, things changed and the profession didn’t collapse.

🧠 In my simple minded brain, if you have a bachelor's degree in accounting and pass the grueling 4 part CPA exam, that should be enough.