You and your day

A long-running client relationship shifts under a change of leadership at the client. A junior staff member quietly mentions that the firm’s senior leadership does not look like the workforce she joined to be part of. An AI tool introduced to the workflow does in twelve seconds what used to take a junior consultant a morning. A tender deadline collides with a regulatory change announced overnight. A senior partner mentions, in passing, that nobody in the firm is sure how the new disclosure rules will affect billing.

Professional services firms broker political conditions for clients across every other industry, which makes them politically loaded in ways their staff often do not name. The legal advice that decides whether a development goes ahead, the accounting structure that decides whose tax burden falls where, the consulting recommendation that reshapes a workforce, the engineering advice that decides what gets approved, all of this is political work in technical clothing. The work shapes who wins and who loses across every sector the firm serves.

Reading the politics is part of how partners, principals, senior managers, and junior staff decide what kinds of clients to work for, what kinds of advice to give, and how long to stay in the firm.

Your community and clients

Professional services sits inside multiple communities at once. The professional community of other firms is one. The communities of clients and counterparties are others. The communities the work affects, including those who never become clients, are others again. The politics travels across all of these.

Different communities of clients have different politics. A wealthy individual client base has different politics than a public-sector client base. A corporate client base has different politics than a small business client base. A First Nations client base has different politics again, and the firms that have done the work to serve First Nations communities well are typically firms that have changed their internal politics first. Class, race, gender, and migration shape who walks into a partner’s office expecting to be taken seriously, and who does not.

When a junior staff member mentions that senior leadership does not look like the workforce, the politics of class, race, gender, and slow promotion is at the firm. When a client expects the partner she met to be replaced by another partner who looks more like the room, the politics is at the firm. The work is always already political.

Your Council and neighbourhood

Local government has a small direct role in professional services beyond planning, signage, and the politics of which precincts host which kinds of professional firms. What Council politics does shape, indirectly, is the local environment that staff move through. Council politics on housing affordability, on transport, on childcare, and on public space all shape whether the firm’s diverse workforce can live near the office and whether staff with caring responsibilities can get to work easily.

Whose voice is amplified in Council politics rarely includes the workforce of large city firms. Junior professional staff, women in early-career roles, migrants on professional visas, and queer professional workers are typically poorly represented in local government decisions that affect their daily lives.

Your state

State politics shapes professional services through regulatory regimes, through the courts, through procurement politics, and through the long-running settlement on which professions are regulated and on what basis. State legal practice rules, state accounting practice rules, state engineering registration rules, and state consultancy procurement rules all shape what firms can do and on what terms.

State politics also shapes anti-discrimination protection inside the firm. State-level law shapes whether women on partner track can expect protection from harassment, whether First Nations staff can expect protection from racism, whether queer and trans staff can expect protection from discrimination, and whether disabled staff can expect reasonable adjustments. The state-level layer of professional services politics covers far more than profession-specific regulation.

The nation

National politics on AI, on tax, on competition law, on financial services regulation, on consulting in government, on professional standards, and on the long-running debates about who profits from professional services and how, all reach firms continuously. The federal political conversation about consulting in government, about audit independence, about wealth management, and about the future of professional work has been intensifying. The political settlement is still moving.

The national workforce conversation in professional services is also a politics of class, race, and gender. Despite decades of policy attention, senior leadership of large professional services firms remains disproportionately white, disproportionately male, and disproportionately drawn from a narrow range of class and educational backgrounds. The political pressure to change that has been moving unevenly. Inside the workforce, the conditions vary sharply. A partner from an established professional family, a first-in-family graduate working twelve-hour days, a migrant senior consultant whose qualifications were partially recognised, a First Nations senior associate, and a queer senior manager all sit inside the same firm under very different political conditions.

The region

Professional services across the Asia-Pacific is shaped by very different political conditions on regulation, on global firm structures, and on the politics of cross-border practice. Australian firms with regional offices are shaped by the political conditions of those offices, including labour conditions, regulatory environments, and political risks. Regional politics shapes which firms grow and where, and which lose work to which competitors.

Migration politics in the region also shapes who works in Australian firms. Skilled migration from India, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and elsewhere has reshaped the workforce of Australian firms over the past two decades. The political conditions of those flows, including visa politics, qualification recognition, and discrimination protection, shape the workforce continuously.

The world

Globally, professional services is in the middle of significant political and technological change. AI is reshaping what junior professional work looks like, and the political question of how that affects the next generation of professional workers is unresolved. Platform competition, regulatory change, and the slow politicisation of consulting in government are reshaping the industry. The global conversation about who pays for professional services and what they get for it is intensifying.

The global professional services workforce remains unevenly composed by class, race, gender, sexuality, and disability, although the unevenness varies by country and region. The political pressure to change the composition has been intensifying in many countries, with uneven results. The political backlash against the change is also active.