Industry insights on skills needs
The Financial Services IRC’s 2019 Skills Forecast suggests the top priority skills for the Accounting and Bookkeeping sector include health and safety skills, teamwork and communication, and problem solving skills. This is in addition to sector specific technical and multi-disciplinary skills. The top three generic skills focus primarily on soft skills including customer service, critical thinking, and learning agility. Data analysis is rated as the fourth most important generic skill for the sector.
According to the job vacancy data, the top generic skills requested by employers were communication skills and problem solving. The most advertised occupations were Accountants followed by Auditors, Company Secretaries and Corporate Treasurers. The top employers were Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
According to the above Skills Forecast, Accountants and Bookkeepers need specific technical skills relating to:
- Processing financial transactions
- Assisting in formulating budgetary and accounting policies
- Administering subsidiary accounts and ledgers
- Operating a computerised accounting system
- Establishing and maintaining payroll systems.
Technology driven automation of tasks will shape the employment outlook across occupations in the Accounting and Bookkeeping sector. There is expected to be a decreased demand for Accounting Clerks, Bookkeepers, and other administrative roles in the sector.
The Skills Forecast highlights that new technologies are also bringing incremental changes into the sector that require workers to be skilled in new tools and techniques in the immediate term. Examples of these include Web and cloud-based accounting systems such as Software as a Service ('SaaS') systems, allowing for real time collaboration between clients and Accountants, and accounting software, such as Xero, that facilitates a paperless system with more automation of tasks and higher accuracy.
The Bankwest Future of Business: Focus on Professional Services 2019 release states that accounting services continue to be one of the more consistent sectors in Australia, with employment, revenue, and wages all increasing at a steady rate. The report reveals that integrating technology into business processes to drive productivity is the biggest focus for accounting businesses. Accounting firms are increasingly seeking to streamline workflow and processes and leverage technology to make the firm more profitable and increase its value.
The report highlights a number of areas where significant opportunities and challenges lie for accounting services including:
- The government will roll out its seven-year plan to restructure personal income tax, meaning personal Accountants and Lawyers will be far more active in the tax advice space as the population attempts to grasp these changes.
- Cloud-based technology for accounting has taken market precedence, as more firms are buying into the efficiency, cost-reduction and ease that cloud-based accounting provides.
- Artificial intelligence is also impacting the accounting sector, with tasks such as payroll, tax, audits, and even banking anticipated to be completely automated by 2020.
- Cryptocurrency has the potential to completely disrupt the processes and general mechanisms of accounting.
The Benchmarking Group report, The Silent Disruption of the Accounting Industry, reiterates many of the above industry insights. It argues that disruption has not (yet) impacted the core role of the industry to provide accounting services such as auditing of accounting records, preparing financial statements, preparing tax returns and bookkeeping, because Financial Technology (FinTech) has always been designed for Accountants to do 'accounting'. Therefore, the accounting industry has required minimal reinvention and remains a necessary obligation for Australians. However, despite being resilient to change over the past decade, the Benchmarking Group forecast that administration and repetitive positions within the accounting industry will decline over the next five years.
In the article Educational Implications and the Changing Role of Accountants: a Conceptual Approach to Accounting Education, the authors state that professional accrediting bodies and accounting education reviews have long expressed concerns about student capabilities and learning outcomes, including the ability to apply knowledge and make reasoned judgements. In this study the authors report on a new design that uses a web of threshold concepts to guide curriculum development, with a focus on students' active learning designed to encourage students to critically engage with threshold concepts in accounting. While the study reports on a single Australian university trial, the methods could be replicated in other educational settings to improve student learning and outcomes.
In the article Future-proofing Accounting Professionals: Ensuring Graduate Employability and Future Readiness, the authors identify 24 capabilities, including six considered essential requirements for every professional seeking to work in accounting, finance, and related work roles:
- Communication
- Ethics and integrity
- Problem solving and decision making
- Critical thinking and judgement
- Adaptive mindset
- Collaboration and relationships.
The research findings provide evidence that these capabilities, in contrast to recent reports suggesting employment opportunities for accounting graduates are in decline, can create opportunities for sustainable careers.
Acuity’s What Skills do Accountants of the Future Really Need?, argues that accounting professionals have an excellent base in terms of their financial skills but the skills they increasingly need as they progress their careers are quite different. Technological literacy is critical, but finance does not work in a silo, so two critical skills required are collaboration and influence. Collaboration skills help accountants gain information, and influencing skills enable them to achieve something with it.
CommBank’s Accounting Insights Report: The Culture of Learning and Future Skills Development, identifies the skills and capabilities that decision-makers seek to secure to ensure their organisation is future-fit. It highlights the importance of better balancing training and development between the organisation's needs and employees' desire to progress in their career. The report looks at the culture underlying staff training and development among accounting firms and the approaches that firms take to securing the skills they need. It also assesses the range of training programs offered and their effectiveness. An examination of what innovation-active firms are doing differently illustrates the value that accrues from getting workplace learning right.
The RMIT Online and Deloitte Access Economics report Ready, Set, Upskill: Effective Training for the Jobs of Tomorrow, reminds us that economists, politicians and futurists have been talking about ‘the future of work’ for the better part of a decade. In August 2020, there were still an estimated 114,000 Bookkeepers employed in Australia – an occupation which, like Accounts Clerk, was predicted to be automated or replaced by technology. This has not happened as rapidly as forecast, in part, because businesses have been slow to change. And interestingly, the National Skills Commission’s Skills Priority List: June 2021, lists the occupations of Bookkeeper and Accounts Clerk as having ‘Moderate’ future demand. Research has not identified any significant difficulty filling vacancies for Bookkeepers or Accounts Clerks across Australia, except in New South Wales where there is a shortage of Bookkeepers.
