Accountancy: an engine of social mobility that can unlock more opportunity for more people
Accountancy has long been seen as a desirable profession. Hard to get into, but intellectually and financially rewarding once you’re in. A passport into the heart of this country’s financial system and some of the City’s most respected companies, it also opens doors across sectors. You can join an accountancy firm that leads onto a variety of sectors, ranging from publishing to the sports sector or a food company.
My accountancy role, training at PwC, was an amazing first step into the world of work and many of the skills I learned then stood me in good stead as my career developed. An understanding of financial processes and business behaviour, an attention to detail, the importance of teamwork and team building – these were all transferable skills that I’ve used almost every single day since. For someone like me from a working-class northern background, with no family connections to the profession, it gave me the chance to learn about business. It undoubtedly opened doors to opportunity. Yet many young people still don’t see accountancy or finance as a career for someone from their background, or dismiss it as uninteresting, because they lack the right advice and guidance.
That’s why the Purpose Coalition brought together a group of leading accountancy firms in a project aimed at drilling down into some of the specific challenges but also at spreading their collective best practice. The project has led to the development of a set of recommendations which any accountancy firm can use to boost its social mobility, and which are detailed in our recently published report, Breaking Down Barriers to Accountancy.
The social mobility issues were examined through the lenses of outreach, access, recruitment and progression, each reflecting the firms’ own experience and their practical responses to each challenge. The recommendations we developed are based on strategies that many of the participants are already implementing to nurture talent and which can be replicated to suit firms of different sizes in different parts of the country. The recommendations are also informed by the best practice we’ve developed with businesses from completely different sectors. Together, they form an accessible blueprint which can be rolled out across the sector.
Solutions include widening outreach so firms don’t just target young people but also more experienced individuals who want to retrain or reskill, rethinking the way work experience and internship programmes are structured to enhance the insights and learning opportunities they offer, exploring ways that job adverts can be made more accessible and attractive to female candidates to tackle the decline in applications from female candidates and introducing company-wide socioeconomic data tracking for all employees to build a greater understanding of workforce diversity and progression rates at every level. In a profession which is all about measurement, it is crucial that tracking and assessment are central to any social mobility strategy.
There's no doubt the industry is facing a range of changes, not least an AI transformation which is increasingly bringing technology in as a replacement for more junior roles. We’ve got to be careful we don’t see the lower rungs of the accountancy career ladder knocked out for a new generation that wants to become part of the sector – those early years and more junior roles are a crucial moment when new entrants are learning from others and learning about business. So, however the tech shift is fused into what the profession does, it needs to purposefully keep its ladder of opportunity strong.
Accountancy can play a dual leadership role in delivering opportunity. It can offer a brilliant career starting point, as it did for me, but it is also time for it to take its social mobility approach to the next level. I hope the report - and the recommendations it contains - will help guide accountancy firms across the country, especially in the most deprived areas, to embark on their own social mobility journeys and drive real change.
