So how to attract more people to the profession? The 2006 Young Accounting Professionals Survey conducted by CCH and Harris Interactive sought to discover the issues important to younger CPAs and how well their firms were doing in these areas. The survey, conducted among 150 CPAs with four to seven years of experience, found that the three most important benefits to young professionals were compensation (74%), flexible hours (51%), and being rewarded directly on their merits (34%). However, only 19 % ranked their firms’ compensation as very good and 20% ranked their firms as very good when it came to being rewarded directly on merit. Respondents gave much better marks to their firms when it came to offering flexible hours– 45% said their firms were very good at doing so.
When asked to choose the three most important infrastructure attributes, 67% cited comprehensive resources, 55% cited access to the latest technology, and 48% cited investment in leading tax and accounting software.
More on the
2006 Young Accounting Professionals Survey is available
here.