The is the third part of an ongoing series of articles by Jody Padar, the Radical CPA, about what the tax, accounting & audit firm of 2030 will look like in regards to technology, talent, and business operations.

For decades, accounting firms developed talent through repetition. New accountants prepared returns, tied out workpapers, fixed review comments, and gradually worked their way toward more complicated assignments and client conversations. Do enough of the work for enough years, and it was thought that eventually you developed the experience and judgment to become a manager, advisor or partner.

AI is breaking that progression. The immediate reaction in many professional service industries has been to worry about what happens when the work at the bottom of the pyramid disappears. If AI prepares much of the return, completes the workpaper, or handles the research, how will the next generation ever learn?

However, that may be the wrong question.

Preparing 500 tax returns can teach someone how to prepare a tax return. It does not automatically teach them how to sit across from a client, understand what actually matters to that person, challenge an assumption, recognize what is missing from the conversation, or make a judgment call when there is no obvious right answer. Those capabilities came from other experiences along the way, like watching, questioning, making decisions, getting some of them wrong, and eventually being trusted with more. Now tax firms have to create those experiences intentionally and much earlier.

Give two equally intelligent accountants the same AI, the same data, and the same client problem, and they will not produce the same result. One may use the technology to get to an answer faster. The other might question the answer, test it against the facts, consider the client's larger goals, recognize what hasn't been asked, and turn the information into a better decision. That’s where human value is moving today.

Preparing 500 tax returns can teach someone how to prepare a tax return. It does not automatically teach them how to sit across from a client, understand what actually matters to that person, challenge an assumption, recognize what is missing from the conversation, or make a judgment call when there is no obvious right answer.

The Firm of 2030 will still need technical expertise, but technical knowledge alone will not define its highest performers. Firms will need people who are curious, comfortable with ambiguity, willing to challenge both AI and clients, able to communicate complex ideas, and are capable of knowing when they need to pull in deeper expertise.

The bigger challenge is that firms cannot wait 10 or 15 years for those capabilities to emerge. They have to learn now how to hire for them, develop them, and reward them on purpose.

Start training through experience

If repetition is no longer the primary training ground, firms need to replace it with experience. According to Dr. Rachel Anevski, Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Matters of Management, the curriculum needs to shift toward doing. Dr. Anevski advocates that firms give their professionals problems to solve and let them explore, test an answer, and get something wrong — then help them understand why. It’s this failure that creates judgment.

That premise likely makes tax & accounting firms uncomfortable. The profession was built around getting things right. We review, verify, and put layers of controls around work precisely because mistakes can have consequences. However, there is a difference between allowing someone to make an uncontrolled mistake on a client engagement and deliberately creating a safe place in which someone can make a decision, see what happens, and learn from it. That is what development needs to become.

Instead of waiting for a young professional to encounter enough situations over 10 years, firms can deliberately expose them to more situations sooner. In fact, Dr. Anevski suggests scenarios like giving junior tax professionals completed returns with issues buried inside and ask them what they notice, or putting an AI-generated recommendation in front of them that is technically plausible but missing important context. Firms could also give them a client scenario in which several answers could be defensible and make them choose one. Finally, it may be wise to let them sit in on a client conversation and then ask what they heard, what they would have asked, and what they think should happen next.

As a firm leader, you aren’t looking for whether your juniors got the right answer, but to understand how they got there.

Dr. Anevski says she sees a particular opportunity here because younger professionals are often very good at finding information. The bigger developmental need is teaching them how to determine whether what they found is actually correct, relevant, and complete. AI makes that skill even more important. Getting an answer is becoming easier but knowing whether to trust it is becoming harder.

Instead of waiting for a young professional to encounter enough situations over 10 years, firms can deliberately expose them to more situations sooner.

That means junior accountants need to learn how to test an answer against other information, recognize what is missing, know when they have reached the limits of their own expertise, and then bring in someone who knows more. Firms then need to close the learning loop. For example, after a client meeting, a difficult engagement, or even a simulation, junior accountants should be asked:

• What did you notice?
• What did you miss?
• Why did you make that recommendation?
• What happened when the client pushed back?
• What would you do differently next time?

Unlike the old model that assumed judgment would emerge eventually if someone stayed around long enough and saw enough work, these conversations turn experience into judgment. If we want professionals capable of advising clients sooner, we have to give them the experiences that build advisory skills sooner as well.

The first 2 years need to look completely different

To get junior accountants to exercise judgment and contribute to client conversations sooner, the first two years of an accounting career cannot look like a faster version of the old model. Historically, junior accountants spent their earliest years learning software, rolling forward files, preparing workpapers, entering data, fixing review points, and accumulating technical experience. Client exposure came later, after they had proven they could execute the work. Instead of asking how we recreate every task that used to fill a first-year accountant's day, firms should start by looking at what someone should be capable of doing 18 months or two years into the job.

Dr. Anevski says that firms can dramatically accelerate that progression. Her model is built around milestones rather than time served, including:

• What does the person need to know?
• What do they need to be able to do?
• Who teaches it?
• How often do they practice it?
• What evidence tells us they are ready for the next level?

This milestone approach changes the first-year experience. The entry-level accountant may start much closer to where today's senior accountant begins. Think about what happened when computers eliminated many traditional administrative roles. The work shifted and didn’t disappear. Professionals learned to handle these tasks, and the baseline expectations for everyone moved up. AI may perform the same trick with accounting. Work that once belonged to junior staff gets absorbed by technology, and everyone begins operating at a higher level.

Firms have to hire for “figure-it-out” ability

In addition to talent development, firms also have to rethink what they are hiring for in the first place. For years, firms have used familiar proxies for talent like GPA, school, accounting degree, technical aptitude, and internships at the right firms. Those things do not necessarily tell you how someone will perform when the answer they seek is unclear.

Dr. Anevski cautions against confusing curiosity with academic achievement. The people who may thrive in the Firm of 2030 are often the ones who naturally try to figure things out. For example, the person who has started a side business, held a string of different jobs, taught themselves something unfamiliar, or kept digging into a problem because they needed to understand how it worked. That problem-solving mindset becomes much more important when AI can provide information instantly.

Firms need to see what someone does when they don’t have an answer and evaluate those behaviors during hiring. Instead of interviewing only for what candidates already know, give them an ambiguous situation and ask them to work through it. Tell them they do not have to get the answer right and then listen. You want to see how they work their way through what’s next and how their mind works when there is no checklist.

This shift may also widen the talent pool. In fact, your best future advisor is likely not the candidate with the highest GPA or the most traditional accounting background. It probably is the person with enough technical foundation to understand the problem and enough curiosity, resilience, and resourcefulness to keep moving until they can solve it.

You can find more articles in this series about the tax, accounting & audit firm of 2030 here‍