Removing barriers to employment and expanding work experiences to job seekers in our community creates economic vitality and addresses the persistent economic disparities in our community. With this belief in mind, today, the Hennepin Workforce Leadership Council and CliftonLarsonAllen (CLA) announce an accounting student internship program that will help build a stronger workforce, directly aligning students’ skills to employers’ needs.
[Related: Read the Star Tribune’s Neal St. Anthony’s article on the CLA accounting internship program]
“The downtown business community is committed to supporting the development of young students from our community who aspire to learn and be prepared to transition into the next phase of their careers,” says Steve Cramer, president and CEO, mpls downtown council and Mpls Downtown Improvement District, and co-chair of the Hennepin Workforce Leadership Council. “This accounting student internship sponsored by CLA offers an incredible opportunity to help current students achieve their goals.
“This is precisely the type of downtown employer commitment to our workforce of the future that meets the goals of the Hennepin County Workforce Leadership Council, an important new public-private collaboration. We are thrilled to support this program and look forward to seeing the future achievements of these students.”
The Hennepin Workforce Leadership Council plans to use a network of six college partners to provide up to 48 candidates who are in the last year of accounting studies for internships in CLA’s BizOps national service center, located here in Minneapolis.
“We expect to add up to 100 people to our BizOps national service center by the end of 2018. The internship program gives students studying in our downtown community a start in accounting and an opportunity to develop long-term careers. It gives CLA access to talented job seekers, who will in turn help us serve our clients across the country,” says Bryon Reinhart, CLA Minneapolis managing principal. “This is the essence of the CLA Promise. Everything we do centers on creating opportunities — for our clients, our CLA team, and for our communities.”
CLA’s BizOps national service center team serves clients across the country from the downtown Minneapolis location. This service center team provides high quality, efficient transaction processing and financial statement preparation using state of the industry technology. This innovative approach centralizes the day-to-day financial work, helping to improve the efficiency, profitability, and quality of clients’ daily financial management. Clients benefit not only from the BizOps national service center team talents, but from CLA’s BizOps part-time outsourced CFOs and controllers, who offer insights into the data and reporting, including industry-specific guidance and on-site leadership.
The CLA BizOps team is one component of CLA’s outsourcing team, whose members help clients improve their financial operations and decision making ability without having to hire additional staff in their organizations. The team can fill a variety of business operations roles, including accounting, finance, financial reporting, audit, risk, compliance, technology, tax, human resources, and executive search.
