Develop The CAS-Ready Workforce

Most firms I talk to want to grow client advisory services, and the numbers back them up.

Practices reported median CAS growth of 17% in the 2024 CPA.com and AICPA PCPS Client Advisory Services Benchmark Survey. The demand is there. The harder part is building the team that can deliver it.

Right now, a lot of firms are building the CAS plane while flying it, and those of us in learning and development are writing the flight manual for a plane that keeps adding seats.

You cannot copy the audit or tax playbook, change the cover page, and call it a CAS curriculum. 

When I talked with CAS leaders at our client firms, about half had some kind of CAS competency framework. The other half were somewhere between "we're working on it" and "it's on the list." Wherever your firm is, you're in good company. And the places people get stuck are remarkably consistent:

• Turning fuzzy job descriptions into something you can actually measure
• Connecting the framework to firm goals, so it doesn't just live in a drawer once it's created
• Bending audit and tax frameworks to fit CAS work, which keeps bumping into walls because the work isn't the same

I walked through all of this in a recent webinar, and if you'd rather watch than read, the recording is here.

Audit and tax have a highway. CAS has a trail.

Before I joined Spiirall, I worked on the CPA exam team at the AICPA. The exam has a beautiful blueprint. I know exactly what's asked of auditors. There are only so many auditing standards, so you can list them and teach each one. Add a predictable busy season rhythm and decades of university curriculum, and audit and tax have a paved highway to follow.

CAS is more like a trail that's still being cut. There's no built-in roadmap and no exam or standards spine to build a curriculum around. The work spans transactions, technology, and advisory, sometimes all in the same afternoon. And every client is a little different. One needs clean books, the next needs a forecast, and the third needs someone to explain what a balance sheet is without making them feel silly.

So the first question isn't "What courses should our CAS people take?" It's "What do our CAS people need to be able to do, and when?" The framework I use to answer that has three steps: map the skills, build the path, and tie learning to milestones.

Step 1: Map the skills

You can't build a learning path to a destination you haven't defined. I find it easiest to think of CAS skills in three tiers, which line up with how CAS services mature. If you've seen CPA.com's CAS maturity model, this will look familiar. That's where I started.

• Technical foundations: recording transactions, reconciliations, client accounting, and financial reporting. This is the bedrock, and it isn't going anywhere.
• Operational expertise: owning the close, internal controls, financial analysis, and KPIs. This is where people go from doing tasks to running processes.
• Advisory work: forecasting, strategy, value creation, and technology enablement. This is where people stop reporting what happened and start helping clients decide what should happen next.

The tiers stack. Nobody gives great forecasting advice while they're shaky on reconciliations or how a balance sheet works. You can't skip levels.

How we built our map

Here's the process we used, and you can steal every bit of it. We brainstormed and crowdsourced first: I read books, studied other frameworks, went to conferences, listened to webcasts, and talked to clients and peers. That produced more than 600 topics, which is roughly everything any accountant should know. Nobody can work with 600 topics.

So we consolidated broad buckets into specifics, filtered out duplicates and nice-to-haves (accounting for bonds is an elective, not a core skill), and leveled each competency by asking CAS leaders where it belonged. Is an adjusting journal entry a level one skill or a level three skill? Then we grouped competencies into career levels and validated everything with real CAS leaders before calling it done. We did this three years ago, before AI, and it took months. You can do it much faster now.

We landed on six career levels and somewhere between 150 and 300 competencies, depending on the year, because we keep updating it. Be patient with yourself. It takes a lot of arguing, sometimes with yourself.

"Knows accounting" is not a skill

Saying someone knows accounting is like saying someone knows cooking. I know cooking. I can make toast or a soft-boiled egg. Don't ask me to make Thanksgiving dinner, or you'll all be having sangria and omelets.

The fix I borrowed from European frameworks is the "I can" statement. It's specific and observable:

• I can reconcile bank and credit card accounts and resolve reconciling items.
• I can record adjusting entries and explain why each one is needed.
• I can build financial statements from a trial balance.

If you can watch someone do it, you can coach it, train it, and measure it. In my competency spreadsheet (yes, I love a spreadsheet), a single entry might read: "I can prepare a complete suite of month-end balance sheet reconciliations for all major accounts, document each with supporting evidence, identify and resolve differences, and produce a package ready for management's review." Each statement is also leveled using Bloom's taxonomy, because understanding a skill and applying it are very different things. And because every statement is observable, I can write an assessment question for each one.

Don't forget the success skills

Technical skills get people in the door. Success skills keep clients. Think of a T-shaped professional: the vertical bar is technical depth, and the horizontal bar is breadth. I don't like calling these "soft skills," because that's too vague to build training around, and there's nothing soft about a difficult client conversation. Be specific: communication, client relationships, feedback in both directions, time and priorities, and difficult conversations.

A CAS professional with only technical depth can build a gorgeous forecast and still be unable to explain it to a nervous business owner. That's half a T, which is really just an I. Build success skills into every level of your map, not into a single leadership course people take once.

Step 2: Build the learning path

My favorite analogy here is a teenager learning to drive. First comes the driver's manual, which is your self-study course. It teaches the rules of the road. Then come lessons with an instructor, where you practice, ask questions, and make mistakes safely. That's live instruction. Then comes driving with a parent white-knuckling it in the passenger seat. I've been that parent. That's on-the-job application with a coach.

Nobody hands their kid the manual and the car keys and says good luck. But that's sometimes what we do with CAS training: assign a course and hope it shows up in the work. The magic is in the blend. Self-study builds knowledge, live instruction builds judgment, and on-the-job application builds skill.

The blend also shifts as people grow. At the foundations level, a lot is genuinely learnable from a course: debits, credits, reconciliations, the accounting cycle. Self-study can do much of the heavy lifting, with live sessions for practice and questions. As people move toward advisory work, the balance flips. It's hard to learn how to lead a tough client conversation from a book, so on-the-job application takes the bigger slice. Set your own mix based on your staffing and client work.

Source first, build second

Firms tell me CAS-specific training is hard to find and that sorting through huge catalogs is a slog. Our catalog at Spiirall alone is about 4,000 courses. This is where the map from step one pays off. It turns "we need training" into "we need these six things at this level," which is a much easier shopping list.

Start by taking inventory of what you already own. Map each course to a competency, and you'll quickly see where you're covered, where you're partly covered, and where there's nothing at all. When we did this three years ago, we found plenty on forecasting and budgeting but nothing on building a balance sheet from a trial balance. So that's where we started.

Build only for the gaps, because building is expensive. My first 90-minute technical course took about seven hours of focused time just to draft the materials and the practice spreadsheet. That was before instructional design, technical review, and conversations about making the slides pop. I'm an accountant, not a slide designer. Spend your build time where it counts.

Managers make learning stick

Learning sticks when someone asks about it afterward, and it doesn't take a big coaching session. It takes three questions and about five minutes in total:

1. Before the course: "What do you want to get out of this?"
2. Right after: "What will you try this week?"
3. A few weeks later: "Show me where you used it."

If you're in L&D and do one thing next week, send those three questions to your CAS managers. They turn a course into a habit.

Step 3: Tie learning to milestones

I'm directionally challenged, so I lean on GPS. A good GPS says "turn right in 500 feet," not "turn right in 40 miles," because you'd forget. And "you should have turned right back there" isn't helpful either. Training works the same way. Front-load everything into onboarding and people forget it before they need it. Wait until after they've struggled in front of a client, and you're just giving commentary on a wrong turn.

The sweet spot is right before the milestone: the first close they own, the first client reporting package, the first KPI dashboard, the first forecast conversation. Choose milestones that fit your firm, but here's how ours look.

That last column is the on-the-job piece from step two. Milestones are where the learning path and the work finally meet. Take KPI selection: taught in week two and first used in month 18, it mostly evaporates. Tie it to a title change and you assume everyone hits the same work at the same time, which rarely happens in CAS. Choose it just to fill CPE hours and you're compliance-driven, not skill-driven. Timed to the milestone, it gets used right away, and what gets used gets remembered.

What happened when we took our own advice

That competency spreadsheet I love so much became the backbone of everything I build. At first it told us what to create. Now, three years in, we have enough of a library to share it, and we just launched it as CAS Ready at Spiirall by LCvista.

We consolidated our six competency levels into three to keep things simple:

• Foundations (35+ CPE): advisory readiness, client accounting, transactions, reconciliations, and financial reporting
• Specialist (35+ CPE): advisory in practice, controls, business planning, financial analysis, and performance management
• Advisor (15+ CPE): advisory leadership, forecasting, strategy, value creation, and technology enablement

We built the foundational levels first, and we're still building out advisor courses, so more is coming. They keep me off the streets.

Each level follows the blend. A foundations path might run from a live "Debits, Credits, and All that Jazz" session to self-study courses on bank reconciliations and adjusting entries, taken right before someone owns their first close. At specialist, courses like "Optimizing Month-End and Year-End Close," "KPI Selection," and "From Deliverable to Indispensable" lead into the first client reporting package. At advisor, financial modeling, storytelling with data, and CFO advisory services lead into the first forecast conversation.

We cover the first two parts of the blend: self-study and live instruction, where we work through practice files together. What I can't do is teach your people how your firm runs its own software and processes. That third part belongs to your managers, and we give them leader guides with questions to ask after each course.

Your next 30 days

You don't have to build all of it by Friday. It took me three months. But here's a realistic 30-day plan:

1. Pick your levels. Even a draft of three is a great start. You don't need six.
2. Write "I can" statements for one level. Start with foundations, because it's the easiest to observe. If you're in L&D, sit down with a CAS leader and ask what people at that level should be able to do.
3. Map what you already have. Match your existing courses to those statements and see where the gaps are.
4. Link one milestone to learning. Just one. Pick the first close or the first client meeting and put the right learning right in front of it.

Small, specific, and done beats big, ambitious, and stuck in the draft folder.

I talk about this a lot on LinkedIn, so let's keep the conversation going there. And if you'd like to explore how CAS Ready could fit your firm, talk to a strategist. Let's go build something great together.