As AI takes over the time-consuming or routine tasks many accounting or audit professionals typically conduct in their early career, building out critical thinking and discerning financial judgement is increasingly important.
However, that represents something of a Catch-22 for finance and accounting leaders: How do you build that expertise “when the traditional training ground and entry level rules where people earn their spurs are disappearing?” Myles Corson, global financial accounting advisory services, strategy and markets leader for accounting firm Ernst & Young asked.
Figuring out a training approach for newer accounting grads and entry-level talent is all the more important for a company like EY — one of the Big Four accounting firms that can often act as a “talent feeder” for other organizations, Corson said, speaking with CFO Dive in an interview with his colleague Sandra Oliver, global assurance talent leader for EY.
With technology reshaping the accounting profession, “building a generation of finance talent that is comfortable adapting [amid] continuous change is important,” Corson said.
Taking a holistic approach
Finding the right combination of tech and talent has become a bigger priority for CFOs in recent years, accelerated by a shortage of accounting professionals and the steady march of AI into the industry.
Upskilling finance staff on effective AI use is critical — but trust, accuracy and foundational finance skills come first, leaders such as Basware’s finance chief Martti Nurminen and Lilac Schoenbeck, SVP of Quadient Digital have told CFO Dive. EY’s Corson and Oliver echoed the sentiment.
“When we're looking at our new college graduates or early careers, we're really focused, obviously, on strong foundational skills in accounting and auditing,” Oliver said, though, “as AI is doing more of that routine work and objective work, we need to ensure that our people have those strong soft skills.”
A partner at EY, where she’s worked for nearly three decades, Oliver oversees the Big Four firm’s assurance talent agenda, overseeing a cohort of 130,000 professionals and working to develop and mentor talent, according to a company biography page.
For Oliver, effective training today means taking a more holistic approach that highlights those communication and judgment skills, “because we're going to see that our early careers professionals are going to be doing more of that judgment work, professional skepticism work earlier in their career than they otherwise would have,” she said. “That then changes what we need them to learn and develop earlier.”
Mentorship remains key
The company is also continuing to prioritize the job coaching, which has long been a pillar of the way EY approaches talent development, Oliver said. That’s going to continue to be fundamental as AI becomes more entrenched into the accounting and audit industry and takes on more tasks.
“From a learning perspective, we are kind of modernizing our learning to be much more immersive, so that it's experiential, bringing in that judgment, professional skepticism,” she said. “Actually, instead of teaching our staff like what to think, you're teaching them how to think.”
For example, one could give junior staff a topic and ask them to teach an AI agent that topic to help verify their learning, she said. If the AI agent provides the wrong answer, that offers an opportunity for the staff member not to just identify that, but to explain and understand why that answer isn’t correct, she said.
Another change EY has recently made is the U.S. EY Career Residency program the firm announced in August, which extends the eight-week internship programs the firm has typically run in the winter into a paid eight-to-12 month residency, according to the release.
The idea behind the program is to provide residents with “that training, giving them some of that on-the-job experience earlier, so that when they do come [to EY], you've got a combination of not just immersive learning that we're talking about, but also that experience” that’s becoming so critical,” Oliver said.
The program, which is geared toward accounting or audit talent in college, provides for the possibility of a full-time position at the business, she said. Residents can also participate in EY’s “360 Careers” program, part of a $1 billion investment the firm made in 2024 to accelerate talent and technology in its ranks, according to the release.
The residency initiative also offers a mix between remote and in-person learning, a critical balance to hit, Corson said. The ability to access online, real-time learning is essential, but “the storytelling and the sharing of experience in those learning environments is a really important catalyst and an accelerator,” he said of in-person opportunities.
That learning can go both ways: EY offers a reverse mentorship program that pairs younger or less experienced staff with more established professionals to help pave over that generational skills divide.
“I learn more through some of our junior staff showing me what they're doing with AI than I do through any other mechanism,” Corson said.
Oliver last year worked with a mentor remotely on her AI skills, an experience which was humbling at first, she said. Over the course of the mentorship, she learned to better hone her AI prompt creation and use, she said.
