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Greg Anderson should have been an actor.
When Anderson talks, careers with high school students, they immediately guess he is an accountant. The taped glasses, pocket protector and nerdy dress tip them off.
"I give them everything but the stereotypical green eyeshade," says Anderson, a CPA and president of Manitowoc-based Ihlenfeld, Skatrud & Anderson.
Then, as he begins to discuss what accountants really do, he removes the icons that represent the stereotype. In the process, he hopes to strip away hurdles keeping kids from choosing accounting as a profession.
"There was a time when probably 90 percent of accountants were men who fit that image," Anderson says. "I'm trying to turn them on to the reality that this is a great career."
The industry is counting on it.
Counting Crisis
Beginning in the mid-1990s, several factors collided to cause a crash in the number of people who chose accounting as a profession. Then came the corporate scandals, and not only were accountants "the nerdy bean counters," but they were crooks as well.
A new standard of 150 academic hours for accounting majors to get their degree didn't help the situation.
The American Institute of Certified Public Accountants commissioned a study which found the profession suffered from: ignorance about what accountants did; negative perceptions about what the people and jobs were like; and systemic barriers such as few classes introducing students to accounting during their formative high school years.
The cumulative results were devastating.
According to the AICPA's The Supply of Accounting Graduates and the Demand for Public Accounting Recruits, the number of bachelor's degrees in accounting plummeted precipitously from 1994-2002, falling nearly 34 percent from 53,360 to 34,995.
The profession launched an aggressive campaign to turn the tide.
"We as a profession have not done a good enough job telling people what...