Changing Face of the Profession Working to Make CPA the Coolest Profession Around.

• Author: Fowler, Mark H.

Once thought of as a "green eyeshade" heads-down profession, the CPA today lives in a dynamic world of change with AI, IT, client service and highly professional standards that goes well beyond providing lax services.

The following are excerpts from a recent CalCPA Los Angeles Chapter Management of Accounting Practice (MAP) panel discussion on the changing face of the profession and what CalCPA Chair Tayiika Dennis calls the "Coolest Profession Around."

Panelists:

Moderator Mark H. Fowler (MHF): President, Stowe Management Corporation

Tayiika Dennis (TD): CalCPA Chair; Principal, Nonprofit Services, CliftonLarsonAllen

Alex Medina (AM): Accounting Student, Cal State University Northridge; CalCPA Industry Influencer

Jason Melillo (JM): CEO, Krost

Scott Donnelly (SD): Partner, PDM CPAs

MHF: Ty, could you start us off with an introduction and how Coolest Profession Around came to be?

TD: I'm honored to be the 2022-23 Chair of CalCPA. I thought long and hard about my theme and I came up with the idea of rebranding the initials CPA. Why not make it stand for Coolest Profession Around. I'm big on acronyms so that came naturally and I'm happy CalCPA embraced this theme. And my firm, CLA, is using it in our recruiting of high school and college students.

I'm looking at it as a movement for our profession to better promote the positive aspects of being a CPA. We have interesting clients; opportunities to travel; and we are part of a well-paying, well-respected career with job stability. We're almost recession-proof!

JM: When I think about what this profession means to so many people, it's the diversity of what we do. I've never been bored because of various projects that I've had the opportunity to work on and the people I worked with.

We're going to practice very differently over the next 10 or 20 years than the previous 50 to 60. With data analytics, artificial intelligence, chatbots, machine learning all that's coming into play in our work life. We are going to require people with different skill sets, not just accountants. Such skills will require people with data science backgrounds, computer programming or software engineering backgrounds and more all to bring different viewpoints to the profession.

Obviously, we have to attract those people into the profession; we have to make our profession interesting; we have to showcase our profession. Ty has started a movement to highlight how cool our profession is and it's our opportunity to showcase that helping bring into the profession students and young workers who may be trying to figure out where they...