Future Accountants Leverage Competition as Career Prep

Last week’s CPA Success post “Labor Day 2011: Laborers Wanted” cited Rick Telberg’s CPA Trendlines blog indicating that 34,800 more jobs in accounting and bookkeeping were posted in August 2011. Even as the market continues to struggle and the outcome of President Obama’s jobs plan remains unknown, this is still good news for the profession. In fact, it puts pressure on the AICPA, educators and other accounting influencers to ensure that there are skilled candidates to fill these positions and the many more that will be available when the economy finally rebounds.

The AICPA is rising to this challenge and encouraging young people to learn more about the accounting profession.

The AICPA’s most recent effort: the 2011 Accounting Competition engages college undergrads in a fictional forensic fraud investigation and allows them to compete against students from colleges across the country for the chance to present their findings to leaders in the accounting field. The competition, a feature on the AICPA’s CPA recruitment website for college students, ThisWayToCPA.com, is in its second year and is already boasting double the registrants of last year’s competition.

Want to know how much students loved being a part of this creative and exciting effort to get them involved in the day-to-day excitement of accounting work? See for yourself! The following video tracks last year’s competition winners and the competition process.

 

Whether it was helping your ice cream parlor boss balance the books, or helping manage inventory at the Gap, what got you excited about being a CPA when you were in college?

Heather O'Connor, AICPA Staff. Heather develops, manages and supports the communications efforts of the Business, Industry & Government membership area and the Academic and Career Awareness and Peer Review teams.  A business book editor in her previous career, Heather especially enjoys writing about the day-to-day business- and career- related issues that CPAs face.