The 70-20-10 Rule Is Not Enough for CPA Firm Staff Development

By Vincent Howard, CPA | Managing Partner, Howard, Howard and Hodges | SkillAbility for Accounting Firms

Last updated: 2026  |  12-minute read

Who I Am and Why You Should Listen

I’ve been in public accounting since 1990. I founded my own firm in 1993, merged it in 2001 to form Howard, Howard and Hodges, and grew it from three people to 50 staff across four locations and multiple states. Our firm was named PASBA Firm of the Year.

For most of my career, my firm’s development philosophy was 70-20-10 without knowing the name: throw people into the work (70), let them ask the seniors questions (20), send them to CPE (10). It felt right — and it produced wildly inconsistent results. Some people flourished; many plateaued; a few quietly drowned. The variable, I eventually realized, was never the ratio. It was the structure — whether the experience was designed, measured, and reviewed, or just whatever happened to land on someone’s desk that month. Since 2020 I’ve built a development platform that more than a thousand accounting professionals across dozens of PASBA member firms have moved through, and the data settled it for me: experience develops people only when it’s built to. This article is the case for building it.

What the 70-20-10 Rule Gets Right

Let’s give the model its due first, because its core insight is correct and it’s why the framework has survived four decades. The rule — developed by Morgan McCall, Michael Lombardo, and Robert Eichinger at the Center for Creative Leadership in the 1980s — holds that roughly 70% of learning comes from on-the-job experience, 20% from social learning (coaching, mentoring, feedback), and 10% from formal training.

The insight that matters: people do not become capable through courses alone. No accountant ever learned to close a set of books, handle a nervous client, or spot a wrong number from a webinar. Capability is built through practice, refined through coaching, and merely seeded by formal instruction. Any firm that thinks a CPE subscription is a development program has already failed, and 70-20-10 is a useful corrective to that.

So the model points in the right direction. The trouble starts when firms read it as a method rather than a description — as if the ratios themselves do the developing.

Where 70-20-10 Breaks Inside CPA Firms

Here’s what most firms don’t know about the framework they’re implicitly running on: it was never scientific, and its central component fails without structure.

On the evidence: academic reviewers have been blunt. As one peer-reviewed debate put it, “there is actually no empirical evidence supporting this assumption, yet scholars and practitioners frequently quote it as if it is fact” — and a 2018 review titled the problem perfectly: 70-20-10 is “a fact in search of evidence”. The original study also had a validity problem: it surveyed managers who had already succeeded — survivorship bias in action. Asking successful people how they learned tells you what worked for the survivors, not what develops everyone.

But the finding that should stop every managing partner cold is this one, from a formal study of the model’s implementation: for experiential learning to lead to effective capability development, “it needs to be structured and overtly managed through regular and effective feedback,” with repeated opportunities to apply new skills — yet in practice, experiential learning “is predominantly unstructured and unmanaged”. The same research names the core misconception directly: on-the-job learning and experiential learning are not synonymous.

Read that again: the research behind experiential learning says it only works when structured, managed, and fed back — and that most organizations run it unstructured and unmanaged. That’s not a footnote. That’s the entire gap between a firm that develops people and a firm that just exposes them to work.

In a CPA firm, the unstructured 70% has a specific face: sitting near a senior. Absorbing whatever client work happens to come in. Learning standards from review notes, one correction at a time. Shadowing whoever has a spare afternoon. Exposure is not development. Sitting near a senior accountant is not the same as learning a repeatable standard — it just feels like it from the partner’s office.

What Unstructured Experience Actually Produces

When the 70% is trial-and-error on live client work, the costs are predictable — and every one of them compounds:

• Repeated mistakes. Without structured practice and gated verification, the same error resurfaces across engagements because nothing confirmed the correction ever stuck.
• Constant manager interruptions. The new hire’s only path past an obstacle is interrupting the nearest senior — dozens of times a day, pulled from the firm’s most expensive people. (This is the manager-bandwidth trap — see why your managers aren’t too busy to train.)
• Inconsistent habits. Staff trained by proximity learn whoever they sat beside — including their shortcuts and bad habits. Three seniors produce three different “standards.”
• Slower confidence. Trial-and-error on real client files is high-stakes learning. People build confidence slower when every mistake has a client attached to it — which is precisely why structured practice on sample files, where mistakes are safe and expected, accelerates development.
• Employee overload. The research flags this directly: leaning heavily on on-the-job learning pressures employees to develop new skills while carrying their full daily workload — a recipe for the burnout and early exits the profession already suffers.

The 20% Gets Overloaded and the 10% Is Too Generic

The other two layers fail in their own characteristic ways inside a CPA firm.

The 20% coaching layer collapses onto managers

In theory, the 20% is mentoring, feedback, and social learning. In practice, because the firm never built an actual training system, the 20% becomes the default delivery mechanism for the missing structure — managers and seniors re-explaining basic workflows, answering the same questions, and carrying the entire instructional load through interruptions. The coaching layer was supposed to refine judgment on top of a foundation; instead it’s forced to be the foundation, which burns out the firm’s most expensive people and still develops staff inconsistently. The 20% only works as designed when a structured system carries the basics, freeing coaching to do what only humans can: judgment, standards, and client nuance.

The 10% formal layer doesn’t teach your firm’s work

CPE keeps licenses active. Webinars transfer concepts. Software tutorials show generic navigation. None of them teach firm-specific execution: your workflows, your documentation standards, your clients’ quirks, your software stack configured your way, the judgment of when to escalate in your shop. The 10% is necessary — but treating generic formal training as the “training” component of development is how firms end up with staff who hold certificates and can’t independently close a client’s books. (The full distinction is in LMS vs. CPE vs. training vs. development system.)

70-20-10 As Firms Run It vs. As It Actually Works

What CPA Firm Staff Development Should Include Instead

The answer isn’t to throw out 70-20-10 — the proportions are a reasonable sketch of where learning happens. The answer is to build the structure the model always quietly required. Real CPA firm staff development includes:

1. Structured practice — deliberate, repeated work on realistic scenarios, not just whatever the workflow serves up. This is the engineered version of the 70%.
2. Role-based pathways — a bookkeeper, a tax preparer, and a future manager need different progressions, each mapped from day one so development is a route, not a drift. (See the 90-day plan that builds independent staff.)
3. Real software workflows — training inside the firm’s actual stack (QuickBooks Online, Accounting CS, UltraTax, Xero), because capability built in a generic environment doesn’t transfer.
4. Sample files and safe mistakes — full simulated client work where errors are expected, cheap, and instructive instead of billed to a client.
5. Assessments and gates — progression locked to demonstrated competence (80% pass thresholds), so “trained” means verified, not attended.
6. Review standards — documented expectations for what clean work looks like, so staff learn one firm standard instead of three seniors’ habits.
7. Advisory scenarios — structured practice interpreting financials and rehearsing client conversations, building the judgment layer deliberately. (See developing advisory skills in accountants.)
8. Manager feedback where it counts — coaching reserved for judgment, standards, and complexity, on top of the system rather than instead of one.

Run this way, the ratios take care of themselves: experience does the heavy lifting because it’s structured, coaching refines because it’s freed from the basics, and formal instruction seeds because it feeds directly into practice. That’s 70-20-10 as capability development instead of 70-20-10 as wishful thinking.

The ratio was never the point. The structure was. Experience develops people only when it’s designed, measured, and reviewed — otherwise it’s just tenure.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the 70-20-10 rule for employee development?

The 70-20-10 rule is a learning-and-development framework created by Morgan McCall, Michael Lombardo, and Robert Eichinger at the Center for Creative Leadership in the 1980s. It holds that roughly 70% of learning comes from on-the-job experience (challenging assignments, problem-solving, real work), 20% from social learning (coaching, mentoring, peer feedback), and 10% from formal training (courses and workshops). Its core insight — that people don’t become capable through courses alone — is sound. However, the ratios were never empirically validated, the original study surveyed only already-successful managers, and research on its implementation shows the experiential 70% only builds capability when structured and managed with regular feedback, which in most organizations it is not.

Does the 70-20-10 model actually work?

Only when its experiential component is structured — and that’s the part most organizations skip. Academic reviewers note there is no empirical evidence supporting the 70-20-10 ratios (“a fact in search of evidence”), and a formal study of its implementation found that experiential learning develops capability only when it’s structured, overtly managed, and paired with regular feedback and repeated application — yet in practice it is “predominantly unstructured and unmanaged.” The model works as a rough sketch of where learning happens; it fails as a method when firms treat raw exposure to work as development. On-the-job learning and true experiential learning are not synonymous: the first is proximity, the second is designed practice with feedback.

How should CPA firms develop accounting staff?

Through a structured system rather than exposure and hope: structured practice on realistic scenarios inside the firm’s actual software; role-based pathways mapping a bookkeeper’s, tax preparer’s, or future manager’s distinct progression; sample files where mistakes are safe and instructive; assessments and pass gates so progression reflects demonstrated competence; documented review standards so staff learn one firm standard rather than individual seniors’ habits; advisory scenarios that build judgment deliberately; and manager coaching reserved for judgment, standards, and complexity on top of the system. This is the engineered version of 70-20-10 — experience still does the heavy lifting, but because it’s designed, measured, and reviewed rather than left to whatever work happens to arrive.

Why doesn’t on-the-job experience alone develop accounting staff?

Because unstructured experience is trial-and-error, not development. When the “experience” layer is live client work, interruptions, review notes, and shadowing, staff repeat mistakes (nothing verifies a correction stuck), interrupt managers constantly (the only path past an obstacle), absorb inconsistent habits (three seniors teach three standards), and build confidence slowly (every error has a client attached). The research is explicit that experiential learning requires structure, management, feedback, and repeated application to produce capability — and that on-the-job learning is not automatically experiential learning. Exposure feels like development from the partner’s office, but without design and measurement it’s just tenure accumulating, at the cost of manager bandwidth and client-facing errors.

Is CPE enough to train accounting staff?

No. CPE serves a different purpose — maintaining licenses and transferring conceptual knowledge — and it does that fine. What it cannot do is teach firm-specific execution: your workflows, your documentation standards, your software stack configured your way, your clients’ recurring quirks, and the judgment of when to escalate in your firm. CPE is the “10%” formal layer of development, and treating it as the whole program is how firms end up with staff who hold certificates but can’t independently produce client-ready work. Effective development pairs formal instruction with structured, firm-specific practice — sample files, real software, gated assessments — so concepts turn into verified capability rather than stopping at attendance.

What’s the biggest mistake firms make with staff development?

Confusing exposure with development. Most firms believe they’re developing staff because staff are surrounded by work, seniors, and occasional training — the accidental 70-20-10. But sitting near a senior is not learning a repeatable standard; absorbing whatever work arrives is not a pathway; and review notes are correction, not curriculum. The result is inconsistent capability, overloaded managers serving as the de facto training department, repeated errors on client files, and staff who plateau or leave. The fix is treating development as a built system — structured practice, role-based progressions, assessments, and measured feedback — rather than a byproduct of employment. Experience develops people only when it’s designed to; otherwise firms are just hoping repetition turns into capability.

The Bottom Line

The 70-20-10 rule earned its longevity with one true insight: capability is built through experience and coaching, not courses. But somewhere along the way, firms turned a description into an excuse — as if surrounding staff with work and seniors was the development program. The research says otherwise, plainly: the ratios have no empirical foundation, and the experiential layer that carries the model only works when it’s structured, managed, and fed back. Unstructured, it’s trial-and-error on your clients’ files, billed in manager interruptions and repeated mistakes.

Your firm already has the 70 — the work is everywhere. What it’s probably missing is the structure that turns work into development: the pathways, the practice, the gates, the standards, the measurement. Build that, and 70-20-10 stops being a comforting slogan and becomes what it was always supposed to describe — a firm where experience actually develops people, coaching actually refines them, and the whole thing runs without consuming your managers alive.

You are not losing to firms with better people. You are losing to firms that built a system around the same 70-20-10 you’re running on hope. Experience without structure is just tenure — and tenure doesn’t close books.

Want to turn 70-20-10 from a slogan into an actual development system?

Book Your Free 10-Minute Structural Alignment Review →

In ten minutes we’ll show you how SkillAbility structures the 70 — real software workflows, sample files, gated assessments, and role-based pathways from execution to advisory judgment to leadership readiness — so experience develops your people by design instead of by accident, inside the software your firm already uses.

To your firm’s capacity,

Vincent Howard, CPA
Managing Partner, Howard, Howard and Hodges
SkillAbility for Accounting Firms

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