Do you remember that story from August about how PwC planned to teach associates to think like managers? The firm said at the time that AI had essentially overtaken entry-level roles — *clears throat* “AI” — which meant new hires would not only need something to do but would need to quickly cultivate a skill set unheard of in previous generations of associates: supervision. Here’s a short excerpt from the Business Insider article about that in case you forgot or didn’t see it:
New hires at PwC will be doing the roles that managers are doing within three years, because they will be overseeing AI performing routine, repetitive audit tasks, Jenn Kosar, AI assurance leader at PwC, told Business Insider in an interview.
“People are going to walk in the door almost instantaneously becoming reviewers and supervisors,” she said.
PwC, one of the “Big Four” accounting and consulting firms, is deploying AI to take over tasks like data gathering and processing. This is leaving entry-level employees free to focus on “more advanced and value-added work,” Kosar said.
“Three years from now, we will feel like the first years are functioning more like fourth years,” she said. “We will look back and say, ‘Okay, these young people feel more like the managers of my day.'”
RemindMe! 3 years.
Fast-forward a few months and The Times is reporting that PwC across the pond is struggling big-time to turn lockdown-damaged young people into consultants. Forget training them to be managers, they’re having to train them on the basics. The very, very basics.
PwC will give its graduates training in “resilience” to toughen them up for careers as management consultants.
The Big Four bean counter is hoping to improve the confidence of its recruits with a new approach designed to cultivate “human skills”, Phillippa O’Connor, the firm’s chief people officer, said.
“Quite often we are struck that the graduates that join us — who are meeting all the cognitive tests we’ve set — they don’t always have the resilience, they don’t always have the human skills that we want to deploy onto the client work we pass them towards,” she said.
“We’ve really doubled down, particularly [with] this year’s graduates, we’re doing a whole load of separate training in their first six months with us, really about resilience, really about some of those communication skills.
“There are real challenges for some of our young people in the context of a post-Covid environment. I can only be led to think that [the pandemic] has reduced some of that … resilience that they build through [education], because that’s really what they’ve been through before they join us.”
Oh, Phillippa. You guys already knew this was a serious issue affecting your future talent. See: PwC UK Interns to Undergo Intensive Training in the Ancient Art of Pointless Water Cooler Chitchat and PwC UK Has a Soft Spot For Students Who Got Wrecked By the Pandemic.
And another:
Maybe I’m getting old but I can’t help but feel bad for these kids getting thrown straight into the deep end. Their formative years were obliterated by lockdowns, they’re fighting for a shrinking number of entry level positions and can see with their own two eyes the mountains of work being sent overseas instead of being used to train them. They’re expected to adapt to the dogmatic environment of Big 4 but the rituals of yore meant to acclimate them to this are gone. No duh they’re struggling.
The accounting profession has been very good to me, but I would encourage my kids to take a different path. I might not have said this 10 years ago.
Humor a first-year accountant; what paths would you recommend?
AI is eating everything. I honestly don’t know a white-collar career field that avoids these problems without being work that is severely underpaid and a non-starter for supporting a family.
I would suggest becoming a professional athlete, especially football, baseball or basketball. Tennis and soccer (futbol) are also good options. My only other idea is to become a big time influencer or social media.
Young people today could use a healthy dose of Stoicism. It’s not really their fault that they’re not “resilient.” Academia has gone out of their way to make them as fragile as humanly possible with trigger warnings, safe spaces, bias reporting systems, etc. A lack of “resilience” is the inevitable consequence of all that.
As Lucky’s Dad once said, “We’re raising a nation of squibs”.
You have to have done the work yourself to properly review the work in my view. this is the problem I’ve noticed with pushing down certain work to shared service centers in India – we have seniors that miss things in their reviews because they never did the work themselves as an associate because now that work is done by India. There will be the same problem with them reviewing work done by AI. All about the bottom line so partners get bigger bonuses.
This goes back decades, before the 150 requirement. The idea behind the extra 30 hours initially was to learn communication skills and to become more well rounded rather than a “number cruncher.” It evolved from there to adding more accounting courses and eventually to an MSA. That’s valuable too, but much of what is needed to be a good CPA is learned on the job. That was true when I started 40+ years ago and is true today. It’s why the Big4 have their “universities.”