[random9749832]

"We are doing what we can to hang on to relevancy as gatekeepers who already held way too much authority over a field". They are going to use AI on the job anyway.

This also applies to universities. The world has changed but they have not and they will make sure to try and stay relevant as much as they can to continue to take money.

Edit: looks like it will take a while for some people to accept that we are not going back from this. The cat is out of the bag and your certificates are increasingly irrelevant. Sorry if you spent a lot of money and time to get it.

[Verdex]

Certifications have always been irrelevant for me, but that's only because my goal has always been what I'm capable of doing on my own AND (this one is a biggie) I was unbelievably fortunate to have several people in my career who trusted that I could get the job done.

Certifications are about low trust. With the advent of modern LLM tech, trust levels are probably not going up.

Nobody needs to hire someone who can use an LLM because if that is the skill they're looking for they can just use the LLM themselves.

So if you need to hire someone because the LLM isn't cutting it, then you'll by definition need to be hiring someone who isn't using an LLM. Someone who isn't just using an LLM to make you think that they aren't using an LLM.

How is that going to be done? Sounds like a job for certifications to me. Not today's certifications, but a much more in depth, in person, and gatekeepery certification.

My guess would be that certifications, unfortunately, will be significantly more relevant in the days of LLMs. Not less.

[gadflyinyoureye]

Isn't that what the CPA and Bar exams, to use US analogs, do? They are an in-depth test or sets of tests that prove a person has a useful set of knowledge in a given domain.

[nkrisc]

I don’t think it will be too long before the pendulum swings back towards “real people who actually know the subject”. At that point, I might feel bad for everyone who coasted on AI.

[design2203]

The damage has already been done.

Much like how if you stop going gym you lose muscle mass, the same happens with knowledge and understanding with the brain.

[afavour]

Get back to me when AI is actually reliably correct about any technical field.

Accounting exams are gatekeeping, yes. The good kind of gatekeeping where you make sure the people doing the job are actually capable. And you have avenues to punish those who fail their clients.

> This also applies to universities

Eh. I’d say the actual academics are about 1/3 of the university experience. The rest is networking and teaching you how to think and solve problems on a more abstract level. I’d say the people who farm that (and particularly the abstract thinking part) out to AI are going to be the ones left at disadvantage in the future. You’re completely replaceable.

[nottorp]

> Get back to me when AI is actually reliably correct about any technical field.

For exams and other tutorial like material* the LLMs have enough public training data for it to be good enough.

* all those vibe coded apps that are 95% boilerplate.

[random9749832]

At the end of the day the job market will correct itself accordingly which is what most people who bother going to university or collecting any certificate care about. And right now it is already looking bleak. https://accountancyage.com/2025/09/29/pwcs-graduate-glow-up-...

Might be time we start adapting the pipeline into employment and start revising the importance of some of these gatekeepers before more people fall into unnecessary debt.

[quesomaster9000]

I've had no end of problems with accountants regardless of their certifications, they operate in a domain with an incoherent body of contradictory and highly subjective rules yet make it out to be a science.

My conclusion as a whole is that accountancy as a profession rarely delivers any actual value to their customers, where much of the job is compliance theater at best.

[HPsquared]

Accounting is a PvP profession. It's you against the taxman and others who want to issue fines etc.

[ghaff]

One of the main issues I had when I took accounting was that you often couldn't figure out things from first principles because the "right" way was whatever the relevant financial accounting standards board said it was. But following that standard is what companies need to do--and therefore has value--even if it's arguably arbitrary (within some general framework).

[eviks]

This conclusion makes as much sense as saying software delivers no value because you've never personally seen an app without bugs