Fabio Riccio joined BKL, a London accounting firm, straight out of school. No degree. He came in through an apprenticeship arranged by the social mobility charity LTSB, studying toward his qualification while working full-time, and won LTSB's Apprentice of the Year in 2017. Ten years after he started, in 2026, BKL made him a partner in Accounts and Business Services.
That is not a graduate trainee story with a longer runway. It is a different route entirely, and it ended at the same destination as the traditional one, in roughly the same amount of time it takes most people to make partner after university and a training contract.
Read on its own, it sounds like an exception worth a headline and not much else. One firm, one apprentice, one nice story about social mobility. But look at what the rest of the profession is doing with its hiring budget this year, and Riccio's promotion looks less like an outlier and more like a preview.
It Sounds Like a Rare Exception. The Numbers Say Otherwise
Graduate hiring at the UK's largest firms fell sharply in the last year. A 2025 survey of 155 employers by the Institute of Student Employers found graduate intake down 8% overall, and the cuts were steepest exactly where you'd expect the volume to be highest.
| Firm | Change in graduate hiring |
|---|---|
| KPMG | Down 29%, from 1,399 graduate hires to 942 |
| Deloitte | Down 18% |
| EY | Down 11% |
| PwC | Down 6% |
At the same time, apprenticeship recruitment across the market rose 8%, even while total entry-level hiring fell 5%. That is not firms hiring less across the board. It is firms hiring differently, and moving money from one entry route to the other.
It would be neat to call this a clean swap: fewer graduates in, more apprentices in, same total headcount. The data doesn't support that either. The same ISE survey found that of the employers who touched school and college leaver hiring at all, 40% cut it. Some firms are betting on apprenticeships. Others are cutting every entry-level route they have. There is no single industry playbook here yet, which is exactly why a firm that picks a clear position now has room to move before the market settles on one.
Why the Entry Point Is Being Rewritten
Two things are happening underneath these numbers, and they reinforce each other.
The first is that AI and modern accounting software now handle a meaningful share of the repetitive matching, data entry and first-pass reconciliation that junior staff used to spend their first two or three years doing. That work was never the point of a training contract. It was the byproduct of not having a faster way to build technical familiarity. Once software takes over the bulk of the volume, there is simply less of that work left to hand to a graduate as a rite of passage.
The second is funding, and it cuts the other way. From 1 January 2026, UK government levy funding for Level 7, degree-level, Accountancy and Tax apprenticeships stopped for new starters aged 22 and over. One managing director of a UK accounting firm called the change a "nightmare." It makes the apprenticeship route cheaper and more attractive for firms hiring straight out of school at 18, and considerably harder for firms that wanted to bring in older career-changers the same way. The shift toward apprenticeships in the data above is not a uniform embrace of the model. It is being shaped, in part, by which age group the government still subsidises.
Put those two forces together and you get firms training apprentices on live client work and current software from month one, instead of a curriculum built around theory first and practice years later. Industry commentary on this shift describes a new class of accountant hitting senior levels three to four years faster than the traditional route, precisely because the apprenticeship model front-loads the practical work that used to come after graduation.
The Assumption That's Quietly Breaking Down
For as long as most people in this profession have worked in it, the assumption has been simple: junior staff pay their dues doing repetitive, low-judgement work for a few years, and that is how they earn the right to real responsibility. It was never stated as a belief. It was just how the training pipeline was built, because there was no faster way to get someone comfortable with the mechanics of the job.
That assumption is not wrong about what juniors need to learn. It is wrong about what kind of work teaches it. Matching a bank statement to a sales ledger by hand a thousand times does not teach judgement. It teaches pattern recognition, and software now does pattern recognition faster and with fewer errors than a first-year trainee. The judgement, spotting the transaction that does not fit the pattern, understanding why a client's numbers look the way they do, knowing when to escalate, is the part that takes deliberate exposure to build. Firms that keep juniors buried in volume work for years are not protecting their training pipeline. They are delaying the part of training that actually matters.
Replacing a senior accountant already costs UK firms up to £100,000 once recruitment, onboarding and lost productivity are counted. Every year a talented junior spends on work that does not build their judgement is a year closer to them deciding a competitor, or a career outside accountancy entirely, will get them there faster.
The Same Question Doesn't Stop at Junior Level
Here is the part most firms miss when they read a story like Riccio's and file it under "graduate recruitment strategy." The question firms are now asking about junior staff, what should they actually be spending their early years on, does not stop being relevant once someone is qualified.
A senior accountant reconciling e-commerce payments at 9pm, or a manager who still personally processes a payroll run every month because it has always sat with them, is in the same position a first-year trainee used to be in. They are spending qualified time on work that does not need a qualification. The only difference is their salary is higher, so the waste costs more.
This is exactly where we come in. At Earth One, we take on the routine, repetitive layer of accounting work, bookkeeping, VAT returns, payroll, reconciliation, so a firm's own team, at every level from apprentice to partner, spends its time on the work that actually builds a career and a firm: client conversations, review, advice, judgement calls. We are not a substitute for training junior staff properly. We are the reason a firm has the capacity to.
Is your team's time going to work that doesn't need their qualification?
Speak to a qualified CA about which routine tasks could move off your desk, and your juniors', without moving off your firm's books.
Book a free 30-minute consultationWhat This Means If You Run a Practice
Apprenticeships are not valuable because an 18-year-old costs less than a graduate. They are valuable because the work can start on day one instead of after three years of theory. That is the same logic worth applying to every layer of a firm's delivery model, not just the entry point.
- Audit what your first two years of junior work actually consist of. If it is mostly volume processing with occasional supervision, you are not running a training programme. You are running cheap labour with a training programme's name on it.
- Decide honestly whether apprenticeships fit your firm. The funding change means 18-year-old starters are now the financially favourable route. If your firm's culture and client base suit that, the ISE data suggests you are not early to this, but you are not late either.
- Separate work that builds judgement from work that has just always been done in-house. Bank reconciliation, VAT prep and payroll processing rarely teach anyone anything after the first few months. Client review, exception-handling and advisory conversations teach something every single time.
- Route the second category somewhere dedicated, so the first category has room to breathe. A named offshore team working inside your own software can absorb the routine layer without your firm losing ownership of the client relationship or the final sign-off.
- Measure whether early-career staff reach client-facing work sooner. That is the real test of whether the model changed anything. Headcount saved is a side effect, not the point.
Riccio's ten years from apprentice to partner will keep getting cited as proof that the old university-first route is not the only one that works. It is proof of that. But the more useful question for anyone running a practice in 2026 is not whether to hire apprentices. It is whether your firm is still spending its most expensive hours, at any level, on work that stopped needing a human years ago.
