Why Accountants are Leaving Their Jobs in 2022
While talk of “The Great Resignation” has settled down a bit for regular news outlets, accountants are still feeling the urge to leave their jobs in 2022, but why? The job market for accountants is in a very peculiar position at the moment with drastic changes to the work environments and looming labor shortages. I’ve been doing some research within my network and on some prominent accounting forums, and today I’m going to share some of the key reasons why accountants are quitting their jobs in 2022.
Reason #1 - The Office
If there’s one thing that accountants have learned over the last two years of the pandemic, the core accounting functions of most businesses can be handled remotely, as long as the accountants are properly trained. For many accountants, going into the office is:
A waste of time spent commuting
A waste of money spent on gas and other travel expenses
A waste of energy that could be put to better use
While there are benefits of going into the office for new hires, such as onboarding and meeting the team, many experienced accountants don’t see the need to go into the office very often (or at all). This leads us to why accountants are quitting their jobs: employers requiring too much time in the office. For some people, “too much” may be more than twice a week, for others, it may be more than once a month. Requiring an accountant to commute to an office environment more often than they prefer doing is forcing them to waste their time, money, and energy when they otherwise would not need to if they worked remotely. This is especially true for employers that allowed their people to work remotely during the pandemic and are now requiring them to return to the office once mandates are lifted. There are definitely some accountants that want to return to the office for a sense of normalcy (whatever that means), but I would say the majority of younger accountants have considered quitting or not applying to jobs that require too much office time.
Reason #2 - The Pay
The unfortunate truth is that most employers pay to attract employees, but do not pay to retain them. This means that staying with the same company will generally not yield a consistent market rate for someone’s skills when compared to hopping jobs every few years. This is true for all industries, but is especially true for accountants in today’s job market. With an accountant labor shortage that seems to be here to stay, the market rate for experienced CPAs is on the rise. Any employer that is not proactively adjusting compensation and benefits to match the market rates (which could be 10%-40% higher due to shortages) will run the risk of employees resigning for opportunities with more pay.
Reason #3 - The Environment
Work environment is critical to employee happiness and productivity, and the global pandemic made accountants reconsider the type of life they want for themselves. In addition to regular working locations and the pay as noted previously, accountants are more actively prioritizing:
Work-life Balance (how many total hours are worked in a week),
Flexible Working Schedules (when the job can be done),
Travel Requirements (not just commuting), and
Empathetic Leadership (No one wants to work with an out of touch boomer).
These are considerations that everyone should have when looking for a job, but they are especially important to accountants who have known life before and after the COVID pandemic. After a record-high year for inflation in the last 30 years resulting from a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic, many accountants have realized that working unpaid overtime to meet client demands (and potentially traveling to do so) with understaffed teams under the leadership of an older boss who thinks that the younger generations are lazy is simply not worth it. The most popular accounting jobs out there right now are the ones that understand how things have changed for accountants not only over the past two years, but also the past two decades. These positions offer some or all of the things mentioned above because the companies that are posting them realize that the perks of the 2010s are the expectations and requirements of the 2020’s and beyond. The companies that don’t properly consider these factors as a part of their working environment are going to lose talent to the companies that do.
With the looming talent shortages and changes to the modern working environment, the war for accounting talent is just beginning. In order to attract and retain talent, companies will need to carefully consider their positions and requirements in order to remain competitive. If they don’t, they may find themselves on the wrong end of a resignation letter.