Irish accountancy firms are losing qualified staff to industry at a rate that is starting to affect more than just headcount. It is affecting succession. The people firms expected to develop into managers, directors, and eventually partners are being hired away by multinationals and commercial businesses — often two or three years before they would have stepped into a genuinely leadership role.
This is not a new trend. But it has accelerated, and the consequences are landing harder than most firms have publicly acknowledged.
The Pull Is Real, and It Is Not Just About Money
When a newly qualified ACA tells you they are considering a move to industry, it is tempting to frame it as a salary problem. Sometimes it is. But more often, it is a combination of things: visibility, autonomy, the feeling that their career is progressing in a direction they can actually see.
Industry offers a cleaner narrative. A defined title, a defined scope, a sense of ownership over something. Practice, by contrast, can feel like an extended apprenticeship with an unclear end date. The partnership track exists, but it is rarely explained in concrete terms. What does it actually take? How long? What milestones matter? When a candidate cannot answer those questions, they start looking at roles where the path is more legible.
The firms doing this well are the ones having those conversations early — not when someone hands in their notice, but during appraisals and development reviews, when there is still time to actually shape something.
What “Retention” Actually Looks Like in Practice
Retention is not a benefits package and a salary review. Those matter, but they are table stakes.
What keeps high-potential people in practice is meaningful work, genuine progression, and the feeling that senior people are invested in them — not just in their billing capacity, but in their development as professionals.
Practically, that means a few things worth examining honestly:
**Are your best people getting client exposure early enough?** If a three-year qualified accountant is still doing largely preparatory work with limited client contact, they will find somewhere that gives them more. Industry will give them more.
**Do your managers know how to have development conversations?** Not every strong technical accountant becomes a strong people manager automatically. Some firms are losing good people not because the firm is wrong for them, but because the person managing them does not have the skills — or the time — to engage them properly.
**Is your partnership track visible?** If you cannot explain it clearly to a high-performer who asks, that is worth fixing. Not because it needs to be a guaranteed timeline, but because ambiguity feels like risk to ambitious people, and they will hedge against it.
The Salary Reality You Cannot Ignore
Let us be straightforward about this. The salary gap between practice and industry has widened. A newly qualified ACA moving into a financial controller role in a well-funded SME or a multinational will often see a significant uplift — sometimes €10,000 to €15,000 at that career stage, and more at senior levels.
Firms that have not looked at their salary structures in two years are operating with outdated assumptions. The market has moved, and if your compensation is not keeping pace, you are funding the development of people who will leave before they deliver a return.
This does not mean matching every industry offer. It means understanding where you sit in the market and making an active choice — not a passive one by default.
When Someone Is Already Looking, What Can You Do?
Sometimes you will find out a valued employee is exploring options. The conversation at that point matters more than most firms realise.
Do not panic-counter. A retention offer made under pressure, without any structural change behind it, rarely holds. The person accepts, stays six months, and leaves anyway — often to a better offer, because now they know their market value.
What works better is a genuine conversation about what is driving the thinking. Is it the work? The pace of progression? A specific frustration that has been building? Sometimes there is a real fix available, and the person just needed someone to ask the question properly.
And sometimes the honest answer is that industry is a better fit for where they are going. If that is the case, the way you handle the exit shapes whether they come back to you in five years as a client, a referral source, or a candidate again. Those relationships have long value. Do not burn them on the way out.
If you are a partner or practice manager thinking about this and not sure where your firm actually sits — on salary, on development, on what your pipeline looks like over the next five years — that is a useful conversation to have before the problem becomes more urgent than it already is.
I work with firms on both sides of this every week. If it would help to talk through what the market looks like right now and where the gaps tend to appear, you are welcome to get in touch.
