As Gen Z enters the audit profession, both educators and employers need to take note of their changing expectations around careers and adapt as needed. By aligning academic preparation with the expectations of employers, educators play a critical role ...
As Gen Z enters the audit profession, both educators and employers need to take note of their changing expectations around careers and adapt as needed. By aligning academic preparation with the expectations of employers, educators play a critical role in shaping future auditors who are engaged, resilient, and ready to lead. But before students enter the workplace, their understanding of what audit is and what it can be is developed largely in the classroom by our activities as educators. We have the unique opportunity to shape how Gen Z perceives audit—not just as an academic subject, but as a career.
Who is Gen Z?
Born roughly between 1997 and 2012, Gen Z students are ‘digital natives’ with strong values around diversity, inclusion, mental health, and work-life balance. They want careers that offer more than a good salary and security—they’re looking for meaningful impact in their work and flexibility in how they work. In the classroom, this often translates to a desire for engaging, applied learning experiences, not just memorizing rules taught in lectures. They also value autonomy and self-direction, meaning traditional, top-down teaching styles may not resonate as effectively. As educators, adapting our teaching approach to meet these expectations can make audit more accessible, relevant, and inspiring to Gen Z.
Why this matters for audit education
For many students, their university modules on audit and related topics are the starting point for understanding audit and developing perceptions about what working in audit might be like. If students see audit as rigid, outdated, or lacking in purpose, they are less likely to pursue it. But if they encounter audit as a dynamic, evolving profession—one that plays a vital role in upholding public trust and enabling business accountability—they are more likely to engage. As educators, our influence is powerful. We can shape not only students’ technical competencies, but also their sense of what kind of career audit offers.
A purpose-driven profession
It is crucial that audit is put forward as a purpose-driven profession. Today’s students care deeply about making a difference. They are more likely to engage with audit when they understand its role in protecting stakeholders beyond investors. In my own classes, the sessions where we consider the evolution of the profession in terms of sustainability assurance resonate strongly with students as they begin to see the importance of the profession beyond the purely financial. Using real-world cases and discussions to highlight how auditors contribute to ethical business and societal well-being is a great way to engage students and show them how the profession is dynamic and responsive to global challenges.
Digital advances
Audit has sometimes been unfairly perceived as dry, mundane and repetitive. But audit practice is rapidly changing, especially with the rise of audit data analytics and artificial intelligence. Integrating these topics into the classroom helps students see the relevance of what they’re learning and prevent worries about AI threatening the existence of the audit profession. Using simulations and providing demonstrations of audit software tools where possible gives students a taste for how audit is performed in the real world. Hands-on experience with emerging audit technologies introduces exciting new learning opportunities for students.
The importance of skills and behaviours
While technical proficiency remains essential, we know that audit firms value a range of skills and behaviours. Resilience, adaptability, and the ability to apply ethical judgment and professional scepticism are sought-after skills. Embedding these into our teaching and assessments—through group work, presentations, or ethical dilemma exercises—can help students build resilience and confidence. I use a role-play based on fraud to support students in developing a behaviour of professional scepticism—an activity that goes down well in class and which students remember and discuss in job interviews. Encourage students to think beyond “what” and explore “why” and “how.” Why do auditors need professional scepticism? How do they respond to emerging challenges like sustainability reporting?
Bring the profession into your classroom
Gen Z values transparency and career clarity. Help demystify the audit career path by inviting guest speakers from audit and assurance practice, professional bodies and business. Collaborate with local firms to develop teaching and learning activities such as mock audit tenders, audit planning meetings, and reviews of audit work. But it’s not just about the audit process. Gen Z students may not be aware of the strategic role auditors play in risk management, sustainability reporting, or data assurance. Including these developments in the curriculum can help students see audit as future-oriented and intellectually rewarding.
By making the curriculum more applied, aligned with the evolution of the profession, and engaging, we as educators can help to ensure that the next generation of auditors is not only technically competent and equipped with relevant skills but is also excited at the potential to join the profession. With the right teaching tools and approaches, we can inspire students to see audit not just as a job, but a rewarding career which aligns with the core values of Gen Z.
There are many contenders for the award of humanity’s greatest achievement. Some say its writing. Others say its agriculture. Electricity, space travel, and human rights are also possibilities. I disagree with them all.
It’s not that I don’t like writing, agriculture, human rights, and all the rest. They’re fab. It’s just that I think the greatest thing we humans ever did was figure out how to form ourselves into organizations. My vote goes to the weird and wonderful social structures we humans build to get more or less complicated stuff done, from launching spaceships to brewing craft beer.
Nothing really happens in the world without organizations. We enter the world in an organized way, with the help of hospitals and maternity wards. We also leave the world in an organized way, with the help of funeral homes and religious ceremonies. Everything in between is stuffed full of organizations of every kind imaginable—schools, universities, social clubs, gossip groups, government agencies, banks, tech companies, and so on. Even the time I set my alarm in the morning involves an organization. I don’t want to be up at seven, but the organization I work for starts early, so I fit in with that. It seems only fair.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that many of the things touted as our greatest achievements are intimately linked to organizations—even writing. In fact, especially writing, which was developed out of arithmetical techniques used in record keeping. The point here is that we figured out how to write, not to record the intricate beauty of human life, but to better process, store, and manage information. It is precisely because of organizations that our oldest written document is a list of ‘goods received’ at a brewery, not a love letter from some long-lost beau.
This might feel a touch tragic, but it says something very profound about what it is to be human. Most obviously, that we’ve always had a predilection for booze—but more importantly, that fundamentally we’re an organized species. It’s who we are. Humans build organizations, of all sorts of different shapes and sizes, and for all sorts of different reasons.
At some points in our history our capacity to build organizations has been really quite impressive. At other times, less so—the demise of the Roman Empire was a particularly dark period. The organizations we have today are arguably the most impressive that have ever existed—they’re incredibly complex and productive. The very biggest, like the UK’s National Health Service, have upwards of a million people in them. Some, like the US Department of Defense, have more than twice that, and they’re literally reshaping the world we live in right before our very eyes.
Yet, most of the organizations we have today have distinctly ancient origins. They’re not old, as such, but they’re based on some pretty ancient innovations. For example, bureaucracy can be tracked back to the invention of writing, while the concept of organizing for the ‘public good’ similarly dates back millennia. At the very least to a 5,000-year-old chain of left-luggage offices in Syria’s Balikh River valley.
State-run bureaucracies like the ones governments use to collect taxes today are basically a Chinese invention. The Qin Empire (c.220 BCE) gave us large large-scale public administration, as well as the concept of an HR department and entrance exams.
The corporation was invented by the Romans, where it was at least partly responsible for the meteoric rise and fall of their empire. Did you know that pretty much all the ancient Roman monuments we goggle over today (and indeed many of Europe’s major roads) were built by corporations under contracts from the Roman state?
Even the founding principles of the industrial revolution are not that new. Modern factories and the idea of mass-produced, standardized products can trace their linage back at least 4,000 years to the Harappans of the Indus River valley.
Of course, another part of the story of human organization is that most people in the world do not actually work in mainstream, ‘formal’ organizations. The truth is that most people on this planet will never hold a contract of employment in organization of any kind—they’ll work informally, in shadow factories and on pop-up market stalls. Indeed, a significant number will work in organizations that are explicitly banned in the countries they live in—they’ll work in criminal organizations, like the Japanese Yakuza or the Italian ‘Ndrangheta.
The point is that there are an infinite variety of different organizations out there, all doing different things in different ways. Sure, some of them aren’t that great, but the rest have done some pretty awesome things—like codify and disseminate the concept of human rights, put people into space, and build computers capable of outthinking us. Organizations define the world we live in, and they reflect the best and worst of what humanity is capable of.
Accountability is a fundamental component of governance, whether the governed entity is a country, a company, or indeed any other corporate entity, including charities, cooperatives, the NHS, or universities.
What is meant by governance? Most definitions of governance, particularly corporate governance, focus on what governance does (direct and control). An alternative definition considers what governance really is:
“Corporate governance describes the way that trust is achieved, power exercised, and accountability shown, in corporate entities, for the benefit of members, other stakeholders, and society.”
Consequently, accountability is a fundamental part of governance. Yet, accountability remains the least discussed aspect of the subject.
The corporate governance matrix
The well-known corporate governance matrix suggests that the process involves strategy formulation, policy-making, monitoring/supervising management, and providing accountability.
Matrix of corporate governance. Created by Kevin Hinton, used with permission.
The right-hand side of the matrix (strategy formulation and policy-making) is essentially forward-looking, covering the overall responsibility for corporate performance, whereas the left-hand demands (monitoring/supervision and accountability) are concerned with the present or past and reflect responsibility for corporate conformance and compliance with law and regulations.
On passive accountability
Many directors think of accountability as the last step in the governance process, reporting the result of recent corporate performance. The literature on accountability has focused predominantly on financial reporting, independently audited in line with the relevant accounting principles or standards. Recent calls for reporting non-financial information have added a further dimension, including, for example, reports on strategy, sustainability, and ESG (Environment, Society, and Governance).
Such reporting suggests a passive approach to accountability, which provides information in line with regulations. Passive accountability typically takes credit for good results but blames poor results on external circumstances, such as market conditions, economic developments, or geo-political issues.
Consider some examples of directors’ reports in such companies:
“Revenues this year increased by a satisfactory 8.3%”—ignoring the fact that a large part of that increase was due to price increases reflecting inflation and that, in fact, the company had lost market share to competitors.
“This year the company has faced shortages of imported components and supply chain difficulties, which have adversely affected results”—taking no responsibility for the board policies which relied on imported components or strategies that approved the supply chains.
“Shareholder value, reflected in our share price, has increased substantially this year, justifying higher dividends and directors’ remuneration”—ignoring the comparable rise in the stock market overall, and failing to recognise that dividends and directors’ bonuses depend more on cash flow than share price.
Board reports showing good results under passive accountability too readily become congratulatory public relations exercises, rather than serious explanations or, worse, opportunities for self-promotion by the chief executive or board chair. However, if the results are less satisfactory, passive accountability blames unavoidable external factors, outside the board’s control.
Prior to each of their collapse, the boards of Northern Rock Bank, Enron, and Carillion produced congratulatory annual reports:
Northern Rock took credit for its significant growth, outpacing competitors, without recognising the increased risk associated with junk-bond rated financing.
Enron took pride in its growth, which was based not only on supplying energy, but by creating a market for energy futures, without realising that, in the process, their strategic risk profile had changed from a low-risk energy producer to a high-risk financial institution.
Carillion gave shareholders a stream of high dividends, based on profit growth, but did not draw attention to the funding of those dividends, which was based on increasing financial leverage (debt/equity ratio), relying on interest-bearing loans, which led to corporate collapse when interest rates rose.
In other words, passive accountability tends to provide the minimum data required by reporting regulations, does not accept responsibility for poor results, and sees accountability as the final step in the corporate governance process.
On dynamic accountability
By contrast, dynamic accountability recognises that passive accountability, routine reporting, and compliance with regulatory demands is not enough.Dynamic accountability believes that reporting performance in terms of financial profit or loss, income and expenditure, or even Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), is insufficient: a complete picture needs to show not only what the results were, but how and why they occurred.
Overall transparency needs to provide information on the context in which the results were achieved. Only then can readers see the full picture. That might include, for example, comparing the entity’s performance with industrial sector norms, describing market conditions, even comparing competitors’ performance.
Accepting responsibility for performance follows in dynamic accountability. The governing bodies of all corporate entities should not only report their organisation’s performance, but accept responsibility for it—whether good or bad, above or below expectations—explaining why those results have occurred. Then, in dynamic accountability, boards describe how they intend to build on the reported results as the basis for future strategic developments, policies, projects, and plans.
It is apparent that the governance matrix (Figure 1) has an underlying dynamic—strategy formulation leads to policy-making, which underpins management plans, budgets, and decisions, which produce the outcomes monitored and supervised by the board, leading to accountability, which, in dynamic accountability feeds into future strategy formulation and policy-making.
In other words, dynamic accountability is concerned with transparency, making visible the entire picture. Moreover, dynamic accountability accepts responsibility for all results—good or bad. It also recognises the need to build reported outcomes into future strategies, policies, and projects.
The significance of culture in accountability
Much of the literature on accountability assumes Western accounting rules. Most countries following these Western practices are democracies, with judicial system and law courts independent of the state. Increasingly, however, economic activity, wealth creation, and associated governance practices are found in countries with autocratic or oligarchic systems of governance. In many of these countries, the law courts are not independent of the state, but respond to state demands, “in the interests of the people.”
Consequently, corporate entities operating in these states need to recognise political influences in their governance processes. Two examples from China illustrate such situations:
The Initial Public Offering (IPO) flotation of Ant Financial Services on the Shanghai and Hong Kong Stock Exchanges would have been the world’s largest IPO. But it was withdrawn by the Shanghai Exchange, at the last moment, following state intervention.
Ant was originally the financial services arm of the vast Alibaba Group, which provides retailing/communication platforms, similar to, but larger, than Amazon. The board of Alibaba was forced to change its organisation structure and unusual governance processes following government intervention.
China is a one-party state and companies operating there need to be sensitive to the political component of corporate governance. Similarly, companies in some countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East need to be aware of political and other cultural influences in their governance processes, including accountability.
AI support for dynamic accountability
We have seen that dynamic accountability can provide higher transparency, requires boards to take responsibility for results, and feeds these results into future strategies. Each of these processes can be enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI) tools. For example, Workiva combines, on one platform, financial with non-financial records to support regulatory requirements, ESG reporting, internal audit, and risk management routines. NICE Actimize can flag compliance with both financial and non-financial reporting needs. Diligent Boards is a suite of AI tools that can support board strategic thinking through data-driven insights that identify relevant competitive, economic, environmental, or socio-political issues.
AI can monitor news sources, social media, and internal systems for early warning of stress, which could result in financial or reputational loss. AI can also assess mass data to suggest money-laundering, bribery, insider dealing, and conflicts of interest. Nevertheless, when using AI, boards should ensure that their AI systems are compatible with their corporate strategies, ethics, and accountability goals.
The way ahead for dynamic accountability
In dynamic accountability, performance reports are not seen as the final step in the governance process, but as an ongoing phase in the corporate governance cycle. Responsibility is accepted by the board for all results, good or bad, explaining how and why these results have occurred. Boards with dynamic accountability also explain how they intend to build current results into future strategies, policies, and projects. Introducing dynamic accounting will need a change of attitude in some boardrooms.
As the “official doctrine of neoclassical economics, enshrined in all respectable textbooks,” the esteemed game theorist Ken Binmore says, revealed preference theory “succeeds in accommodating the infinite variety of the human race within a single theory simply by denying itself the luxury of speculating about what is going on inside someone’s head. Instead, it pays attention only to what people do.”
So great is its reach that it doesn’t stop with the entire human race. The first papers on experimental economics I ever read as an undergraduate were about how pigeons and rats exhibit ordered preferences and downward-sloping demand curves. How absolutely thrilled was I to learn that I could apply intermediate microeconomics to the entire animal kingdom.
Economists and our students alike read Binmore’s statement and nod in agreement. It doesn’t seem to occur to us, as economists, to question what we ask of our first-year students: What are the benefits and costs of stretching a theory to accommodate all forms of human and animal life? Mid-twentieth-century economists like Paul Samuelson and Hendrik Houthakker developed the tool of revealed preferences to organize consumer behavior in markets. They were interested in the orderly way that consumer purchases change when budget constraints shift. They were not interested in why people switch from butter to margarine when the price of butter increases, just like the experimental economists Ray Battalio and John Kagel were not interested in why a rat switches from Tom Collins mix to root beer when the number of lever presses for Tom Collins mix increases.
Lest I be misunderstood, let me clearly state upfront, for the record, that utility maximization is both important and useful for understanding economics. But let’s also be clear-eyed and honest about its usefulness. Utility maximization is not a sufficient foundation for understanding economics. Economists designed the utility maximization problem to explain intelligible economic consequences—that is, outcomes and outcomes only. The tool provides answers to questions like: What happens to a consumer’s purchases when the price of a good increases? How much of the change is due to their purchasing power, and how much is due to switching to cheaper alternatives?
Economics, however, omits something rather important—namely, that which makes us human—when we do not study ourselves as purposeful beings. If a captor offers us either root beer or Tom Collins mix for pressing a lever, sure, to an observer from Mars, we would look just like a rat in a cage and prefer root beer to Tom Collins mix if and only if we choose root beer over Tom Collins mix. But to state the obvious, we, as human beings in our everyday lives, do much more than simply prefer good B to good A if and only if we choose B over A.
Human beings make meaningful decisions. We understand what one another does as intelligent conduct. We make sense of what people do by what they feel, think, know, and want. Human beings value A in the moment and value B in the future, and we imagine how good it would be for us to have B but not A in the future. We jointly imagine a better future and exchange A for B with another human being.
Human beings are the only species that routinely exchanges one thing for another thing, and all human communities do this. Primatologists have tried their hardest to create the conditions for captive chimpanzees to trade fruit they liked less for fruit they liked more. But chimpanzees would not give up something in this moment for something else they favored more in the next moment. For chimpanzees, there is no favored fruit in the future. There is only now and the fruit in their physical possession now.
Humans stand alone in nature as beings who purposefully turn natural-born enemies into exchanging friends. Humans stand alone as beings who deliberately extend their own average life expectancy and intentionally decrease their own rate of infant mortality. Humans stand alone as beings who actualize healthier and more comfortable lives for themselves. Humans are a marvel. We … are a marvel! Understanding humankind’s place in the world is key to understanding why economics is necessary to explain the wonder and surprise of the human condition.
Our common humanity tends to get lost, however, in modern social science. We doggedly search for quantitative differences among people—statistically significant differences, of course. The very foundation of economics, however, is about what all human beings do, a point that seems to go unmentioned in every principles of economics textbook. As Adam Smith clearly recognized, the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, however, rests on “the certain propensity in human nature … to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another.” What sets us apart is not just what we choose or trade, but that we choose to trade—purposefully, imaginatively, and with an eye toward a future that only human beings can envision.
In the age of gig economy, remote work, and juggling multiple jobs, unpaid labour is no longer confined only to the domestic sphere or volunteerism. It is now an insidious undercurrent in paid employment, eroding worker rights and deepening inequality. From the creative freelancer logging extra hours to secure their next project, to the care worker stretching beyond paid duties to ensure a client’s wellbeing, unpaid labour permeates contemporary work. But why does it persist, and how can we confront the structural inequities it perpetuates?
This question lies at the heart of today’s most pressing debates on work and labour. The phenomenon of unpaid labour—work performed without direct or low compensation—is not merely a byproduct of precarious work; it can actively sustain and exacerbate it. It is time to unmask the political and structural forces behind this unpaid toil and demand systemic change.
Who benefits from unpaid labour?
Unpaid labour operates as a hidden subsidy to employers. In many industries, workers are compelled to extend their working day without additional pay to meet deadlines, maintain job security, or adhere to “ideal worker” norms. Internships, unpaid overtime, and tight employer control over schedules are just a few examples. This trend is especially pronounced in gig and platform work, where freelancers compete in a global marketplace, often shouldering risks and costs previously borne by employers.
The irony is glaring: while unpaid labour generates profits for employers and value for markets, it disproportionately harms workers. Financial insecurity, job unpredictability, and the erosion of social benefits are direct consequences. The concept of “wage theft” and “income theft” captures this injustice aptly: workers are denied the full value of their effort, trapped in a cycle of intensifying precarity.
Precarity as a process, not just a condition
To understand the entrenchment of unpaid labour, we must shift from viewing precarity as an isolated economic condition to recognizing it as a process shaped by systemic power imbalances. Neoliberal labour policies have deregulated employment, weakened unions, and heightened employer control over workers. These dynamics enable employers to extract unpaid labour under the guise of norms, even underpinning career advancements.
For instance, in care work—an industry already strained by privatization and cost-cutting measures—unpaid labour often takes the form of emotional labour and unpaid overtime to meet ethical or relational commitments to clients. Similarly, in creative sectors like dance or art, unpaid labour masquerades as “investment” in one’s career, pushing workers to accept unpaid gigs for visibility or future opportunities. Platform workers, on the other hand, endure unpredictable schedules and unpaid “waiting time” between tasks. Across these sectors, the pattern is clear: unpaid labour sustains an unequal distribution of risk and reward.
The inequities of unpaid labour
The ability to endure unpaid labour hinges on access to resources—financial, institutional, and social. Workers with familial wealth, spousal support, or robust welfare systems can buffer its impact, creating a divide between those who can afford to subsidize their work and those who cannot. This dynamic perpetuates inequality not only between individuals but also across class and identity lines, such as gender and race, as marginalized groups often lack the resources needed to sustain unpaid labour without severe consequences.
Treating unpaid labour as a personal sacrifice or a stepping stone to success obscures its broader societal harm. Instead, we must recognize it as a structural issue demanding systemic change.
Demanding systemic change: power redistribution
Unpaid labour is not an individual failing or just a symptom of precarity but a result of the ways systemic forces—like policies, cultural norms, or economic structures—create and maintain unequal power relations. This approach highlights the interconnectedness of unpaid labour and structural conditions, moving beyond individual experiences to address the root causes. Within this context, unpaid labour is a symptom of deeper structural inequalities. Tackling it requires us to rethink the politics of work, from labour laws to norms and narratives. By exposing the hidden costs of unpaid labour and advocating for systemic change, we can create a fairer, more equitable world where work is dignified, compensated, and sustainable. It is time to reclaim the ‘value’ of labour and demand justice for all workers. If unpaid labour is a political issue, then addressing it requires political solutions.
Here are four concrete steps to counter its corrosive effects:
1. Make collective bargaining effective by including workers with insecure, irregular, and informal connections to paid work.
An inclusive approach should ensure that collective agreements apply across entire sectors, covering even small or informal businesses. This would prevent companies on the fringes of the formal economy from exploiting gaps in worker protections. It also requires trade unions to mobilize and organize across traditional divides by forging alliances with grassroots organizations that have strong connections to disadvantaged workers. For example, in Germany, migrant care workers fought to have their qualifications recognized, a struggle that could benefit from union support.
2. Reduce working time in paid employment for waged labour to give workers more time to manage personal and family responsibilities, reducing their reliance on unpaid labour to meet these needs.
This approach is particularly impactful for caregivers and those juggling multiple jobs, who often bear the brunt of unpaid work. By redistributing work across more employees, reduced working hours can also create formal employment opportunities for those in precarious or informal arrangements. To ensure this policy is effective, wage adjustments and income protections must accompany shorter hours to prevent workers from losing income or facing increased workloads within reduced timeframes.
3. Introduce government policies which subsidize reduced working hours through tax incentives or direct wage supplements.
For instance, caregivers taking on fewer paid hours could receive compensatory support to ensure financial stability. Employment laws must also prevent employers from imposing unreasonable productivity targets during shorter work periods, protecting workers from intensified labour demands. Additionally, investment in public services like affordable childcare, eldercare, and healthcare can alleviate the unpaid labour burden that disproportionately falls on women and marginalized groups.
4. Promote educational initiatives and public campaigns that challenge the narratives normalizing unpaid labour.
The myth of the “ideal worker”—endlessly available, self-sacrificing, and driven by passion—legitimizes exploitation and reinforces gendered divisions of labour, where unpaid work is disproportionately carried out by women. By questioning these harmful narratives and recognizing the social and economic value of all forms of labour, we can foster a culture that values humanity and sociality over mere productivity.
