The position that can't be filled
I learned the trade by coding incoming and outgoing invoices, posting payments and reconciling accounts. Today I build tools that automate part of exactly this work.
At the same time, tax firms are looking for staff and cannot find them. According to the STAX survey of the German Federal Chamber of Tax Advisers (2024, reference year 2023), among sole practitioners who had tried to fill positions, 43.4 % could not fill any and a further 33.4 % could fill only some of their vacancies. Most of those sought were tax assistants (Steuerfachangestellte).
The obvious answer is automation: if nobody does the routine work, software should. That is right, and it is exactly what I work on. But the routine had a second job that appears in no job description. It was the apprenticeship. Coding invoices teaches you journal entries and tax codes. Posting payments teaches you how money and documents belong together. Reconciling accounts teaches you where errors hide. Automate the routine and you abolish the apprenticeship – unless you replace it.
The awicontax Zukunftskompass 2026, a study by the German tax advisory group of the same name based on twenty interviews with firms and a Civey survey of 1,500 decision-makers in medium-sized companies, describes the goal (my translation): “Tax assistants become process managers, tax advisers become strategists.” As a new competence triangle it names subject expertise, technological understanding and communication skills. What remains open for me is how you become a process manager without ever having gone through the process yourself.
For me, this means: automation does not replace the missing specialist. It is what allows the existing one to do what they were hired for. But whoever hands the routine to a machine has to rebuild the apprenticeship deliberately. Newcomers then check the rules by which the machine posts, clarify the exceptions where it stops, and understand the reconciliation before it runs automatically. The study puts it soberly: “Every digital transformation begins with a cultural one.”
Which task did you learn the trade on – and what do your newcomers learn it on today?