Chartered Accountants Australia and New Zealand’s (CA ANZ) submission to the Future Skills Organisation’s Payroll, Bookkeeping and Accounting Needs and Gap Analysis focuses on accounting workforce needs, digital skill gaps, and the vocational education and training required to support high‑quality financial reporting, assurance, taxation and advisory services in Australia.

Coordinated action from educators, industry and government to address these issues will help build a more resilient, future ready accounting workforce to support business confidence, productivity and economic growth.

Workforce shortages

Demand for experienced accounting professionals in Australia continues to outpace supply. This is creating ongoing shortages, particularly in audit, taxation, and general accounting roles.

Shortages are most acute in regional labour markets, where smaller candidate pools and strong competition for talent make recruitment harder.

Small and medium accounting practices, including regional firms, are disproportionately affected. Many report reduced capacity to take on new clients, longer turnaround times for compliance work, and limited ability to expand advisory and digital services.

Attraction and retention

Effective attraction and retention spans the full career journey - from building early awareness of accounting courses and careers through to flexible entry pathways, qualification, employment, structured early‑career development and ongoing professional learning.

CA ANZ’s four P’s of attraction strategy - Perception, Pathways, Pipeline and Policy - focuses on reshaping perceptions of accounting; expanding inclusive entry pathways into the Chartered Accountants (CA) Program; strengthening early engagement that reinforces the value of the CA designation; and advocating to increase the supply of critical accounting skills and talent.

Digital skills

While current vocational education and training (VET) accounting qualifications provide strong foundations in traditional accounting, compliance and reporting, they do not yet fully reflect the pace and impact of digital transformation in contemporary practice.

Key digital skill gaps include:

• AI‑assisted accounting workflows (automation, anomaly detection and predictive analytics)
• ethical use of AI (professional judgment, accountability, data bias and appropriate reliance on automated outputs)
• data governance and integrity in increasingly integrated systems
• applied cybersecurity awareness (client data protection, access controls and risk identification).

Training

To better align current VET accounting qualifications with employer needs, more defined specialisation pathways could be introduced at the Diploma and Advanced Diploma levels through electives or skill sets, while retaining a strong generalist core.

Priorities for more visible and intentional specialisation include tax compliance and advisory, management accounting and business analytics, practice‑based SME advisory, and payroll‑accounting integration.

VET and higher education pathways

A stronger connection between vocational and higher education pathways in accounting would help to position VET as a credible, practice-focused entry and progression pathway into accounting careers, rather than a parallel or alternative route.

This can be achieved through clearer credit and articulation arrangements from Diploma and Advanced Diploma qualifications into undergraduate accounting degrees, better alignment of learning outcomes, and bridging units or capstone experiences that emphasise applied accounting practice.