It’s no secret that finding and retaining talent is a major challenge for accounting firms and finance departments. The need for new talent is particularly pressing for CPA firms and accounting organizations, as older CPAs are retiring and fewer younger accountants are lining up to take their places.

The accounting talent shortage is showing up in painful ways for some organizations: Tupperware delayed its public filing earlier this year when the company didn’t have enough accountants, the IRS is falling short on revenue goals because of a talent shortage, and the accountants who are working are more prone to burnout and errors.

Susan Coffey, CEO of public accounting at the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants (AICPA), is at the forefront of efforts to address the accounting pipeline. She recently spoke with CFO Brew about the challenges facing accounting, how employers are responding to the talent shortage, and the skills that new accountants will need for the future.

This is part two of a two-part series on the talent pipeline in 2025. To read part one, click here. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How would you describe the accounting talent pipeline and the challenges that organizations are facing in that pipeline?

It’s interesting, because there are some hard trends that we’ve been seeing over the last several years. Probably since 2017, we’ve started to see declines in CPA exam-takers and college graduates in accounting. Studying it further, we saw, like every profession, that declining birth rates are finally catching up with us, and you know, our country’s immigration policy and what that means for talent coming in.

For more on accounting talent trends in 2025, click here.—DA

We know that 2024 has been a long year. There’ve been hurricanes, elections, interest rate cuts, and Brat summer. All of that volatility makes keeping up with and honing your skills as a finance and accounting professional increasingly important.

To help you keep up, CFO Brew is here to help with one of our most popular features, the LinkedIn Cheat Sheet Roundup. Every month, we gather three of the most useful professional development cheat sheets from across LinkedIn. This year, we’ve had editions focused solely on career development and accounting, as well as others offering multiple skill tips.

Since it’s that time of the year, we’ve decided to share some of our favorite LinkedIn cheat sheet tips that we’ve gathered in 2024.

Our usual disclaimer to the wise: You should always look for additional resources and expertise when doing complicated finance (or accounting) work, because it can be difficult to accurately sum up sophisticated concepts in a short space.

• Waqar Khan, “Microsoft Excel cheat sheet.” Look, we know that GenAI is all the rage right now, but AI hasn’t replaced Excel as the backbone of accounting just yet. To help accountants of all stripes improve their Excel chops, Khan posted this six-page cheat sheet covering basic, intermediate, and advanced skills and tools.
  
  The basic skills section includes tips on getting started with Excel, keyboard shortcuts, basic formulas, and formatting shortcuts. For users with more experience, among the tips are chart types and elements, managing data, and collaborating using Excel. For advanced users, you’ll find guidance on creating pivot tables, macros, and advanced formulas.

Click here for more of our favorite cheat sheet tips. —DA