Students get firsthand look at accounting profession through Steelers partnership
Amira Thomas is only halfway through high school, but the 16-year-old is already taking steps to help her future career.
On Thursday, Amira was one of nearly 10 Woodland Hills students who met with accounting professionals and college professors at Acrisure Stadium to see if a career in the finance field is something they want to pursue in the future.
“Money, it’s everything in this world,” Amira, a sophomore, said. “It’s really what you need to live and in order to survive you need to know how to handle that money and manage that. So I came here to give me a head start on how to do that.”
The “Steelers Showcase” event was hosted by the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Washington D.C.-based Center for Audit Quality, which launched the nationwide Accounting+ program in 2022 to address diversity in the accounting talent pipeline. The organization expanded into Western Pennsylvania in October when it announced a partnership with the Steelers.
Thursday’s event featured accounting professionals from BDO, Deloitte, EY and Grant Thornton. There were also officials from colleges including Carnegie Mellon, the Community College of Allegheny County, Duquesne, Point Park, Saint Vincent, the University of Pittsburgh and Howard University, a historically Black research institution in Washington D.C.
It was the third session the students participated in. Previously, a group of nearly 25 Woodland Hills students visited the football team’s practice field, where they met with the organization’s chief financial officer and other professionals. They also attended a Steelers game against the Green Bay Packers.
The goal is to show students that a career in accounting is possible while working to reverse the ongoing accountant shortage.
According to the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the number of people completing bachelor’s degrees in accounting dropped 7.8% from 2021- 22. That followed a steady decline of 1% to 3% each year since 2015-16. And the number of people receiving master’s degrees in the field also fell 6.4% in 2021-22. Those numbers come as almost 75% of the CPA workforce met retirement age in 2020, the organization found.
The shortage has already led to impacts for several major companies. Tupperware this week said it didn’t have enough accountants to get its annual report out on time, Business Insider reported. That comes after about 70 companies have postponed annual reports this year, a 40% increase from last year, the research company Intelligize found.
And at the same time, diversity in the field has struggled to improve. In 2023, 64% of certified accountants were white followed by 10.8% who were Hispanic or Latino. Only 8.5% were Black, according to Zippia.
“Accounting is a profession that everyone can have,” Hope Mills, who works at Deloitte, said. “It’s a major you can do in school and a lot of us, I think, coming from rural communities, we don’t realize that these type of careers are not only stable but they are a great way to be able to provide for our families and a way to create generational wealth for our families that some of us didn’t have before.”
The event also featured former Steelers quarterback Charlie Batch, who said that having an organization such as the Steelers involved in these initiatives is a chance to show teens that “there’s a lot of things that happen behind the scenes” on NFL game days “that could be different career fields for them.”
“In high school you’re thrown so many different things,” Mr. Batch said. “What do you want to do after high school? What do you want to do here? You just don’t have the answer. But when you make it in a relaxed atmosphere … it makes it fun, you build relationships and you’re able to actually have mentors to walk you through that process.”
For Troy Akins, a 17-yearold junior who plans to pursue finance after graduation, the event was a chance for him to gain “insight about what I want to do when I get older.”
Amira, the Woodland Hills sophomore, added that the program has “been really enlightening for me because I really haven’t gotten to see much of the accounting field before this.”
While she plans after graduation to enlist in the military, where she hopes to become a firefighter and paramedic, she is hopeful that background knowledge in accounting will aid her in her career while helping her manage her personal finances.
“Getting to see all these people,” Amira said, “who made accounting their life because they want to help people manage their money, they find joy in managing money and they put in so much work so that they were able to do this is really amazing to me.”