Education continued

Professional development isn’t what it used to be. Like the information it imparts, continuing education for CAs —and the type of knowledge that’s in demand — is changing

By Mary Teresa Bitti
Illustration: Gérard DuBois

Amanda Iacovetta was the only CA in sales and account management at HR consulting firm Morneau Shepell Inc. in Toronto (she has since moved to recruitment firm Madison MacArthur in Toronto). In addition to seeking out professional development to help her in her career, she is also interested in business etiquette and networking, and has looked into a social networking course through the CICA. “Social networking is on the rise; it’s a way to promote anything and I think it’s important,” she says.

Welcome to the changing scope of continuing education for CAs. While ongoing professional development is now a requirement to keep the CA designation current and in good standing, the highly competitive economic climate and complexity of business in a global environment means that technical proficiency alone is not enough to be effective and help take a career or a practice to the next level. Throw in the rise of social media and networking, the need to keep pace with fast-changing technology and the fact that no one can rely on the last project to land them the next, and the new reality is that what a CA needs to know goes well beyond the expectation that he or she will stay up to speed with changing standards and new tax rules.

It was precisely for this reason that in October 2010, KPMG Business School was launched. Until that point, a large part of the firm’s learning and development was focused on technical skills. “We were developing highly proficient technical practitioners but there was this thirst, this pent-up demand from our people who wanted to really understand their clients’ business in order to be able to provide that value add,” says David Connal, executive director of the KPMG Business School. “At the same time, there is so much time pressure on our practitioners we decided to look closely at the different modalities and the way we deliver training.” The result: KPMG focused on weaving industry knowledge into the technical training. One example is the creation of industry knowledge podcasts that can be easily downloaded and divided into small pieces available any time, anywhere on any smart device.

What KPMG has done with its business school reflects what is happening in professional development in general. “There are two kinds of professional development taking place,” says Jeffrey Gandz, a professor and managing director of program design for the executive development division of the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont. “On the one side is upgrading of knowledge and skills via shorter, more compressed efficient delivery systems. On the other, there is a growing focus on developing judgment and much more recognition that context and effective developmental experiences are critical.”

As a result, the provincial institutes/ordres and the CICA have moved in the same direction with their course offerings. While technical courses are still their mainstay and the majority of the CICA’s professional-development programs remain focused on income-tax training and financial reporting, the profession is seeing an increased demand for leadership training and all that encompasses: effective communication skills, the ability to give feedback, build relationships and help newer CAs move up the ranks. “With all our course offerings, our guiding principle is to blend academic rigour and real-life business application,” says Frank Colantonio, director of continuing education at the CICA. “Context is key.”

Historically, CAs have been required to maintain their professional competence, but it wasn’t until the early 1970s that the provincial institutes looked at implementing mandatory continuing professional development. However, voluntary reporting revealed that for the most part, CAs were already undertaking pr0fessional development far in excess of any standard and there was no apparent need to mandate continuing education. Fast-forward to the early part of the 2000s and the business environment had changed, lending itself to high-profile failures such as Enron and WorldCom. “It was no longer enough to simply say CAs were staying on top of things,” says Susan Cox, director of professional development at the Institute of Chartered Accountants of On-tario. “We had to show that we were monitoring the profession.”

Marketing 2.0: Learning how to build your personal brand

Paul Copcutt, founder of Square Peg Solution in Hamilton, Ont., describes himself as a personal brand architect. He is a speaker and consultant to professionals and executives and the teams they lead. “CAs spend so much of their time studying and training in technical areas,” he says, “but very little on what will end up differentiating them in the marketplace and even in their own firms.”

When it comes to marketing, says Copcutt, CAs want to know what they can do to ensure they get noticed for the right projects and job opportunities. The best way to differentiate? Build your personal brand. The key is to get clear about your personal brand, then communicate it effectively. “In the reality of today’s world it is up to all of us to own the definition of who we are. Personal branding lets us do this,” he says. Beyond technical skill sets it is important to identify and understand emotional attributes — those character traits that make you stand out and are the reasons people will hire you, want to work with you and for you.

Here are Copcutt’s five Rs of personal branding:

Relevance — is it right for your industry and vocation? What might be right for someone in advertising could be over the top for an accountant.

Resonance — does it make sense to your target audience?

Relation — is there a connection for everyone? This has to feel right not just for the target audience but also for you and the people who will be involved in delivering the work.

Remarkability — does it stand out? Will it get noticed? Are you leveraging your key skill and attribute differences? Dare to be different.

Real — does the personal brand come through? This is an opportunity to design the life/career you want. It is not asking you to do anything that you feel uncomfortable with or that compromises who you are; it’s all about the real you.

Today, harmonized requirements across provinces mean that all CAs must complete 120 hours of continuing education over a three-year period. Half that has to be verifiable continuing education (think a classroom setting or elearning modules with assessment built in) but the rest is wide open, as long as it is relevant to the work CAs do. As a result, it can be much more informal (think reading industry journals, accessing podcasts, teleconferences and webinars, for example) than traditional modes of education.

What CAs want
When it comes to professional development, the needs and wants of CAs depend on a number of factors — their unique role, the needs of the client, the sector they serve — and, on the most basic level, where they are in their career. Recognizing this, MacKay LLP, a midsize accounting firm in Western Canada with a staff of 250 including 43 partners, is in the process of developing a learning ladder with in-house workshops, external seminars and courses for staff. “When it comes to newer CAs, the demand is for courses on improving delegation skills and sales skills,” says Jackie Morton, the firm’s HR director. “If they want to become partners, they need to build a practice and they want help learning how to do that — how to get things done through others, how to build their network and start to establish a client base. So we are working on programs around how to promote your business, capitalize on opportunities with existing clients and expand the work you do by cross-selling services.” MacKay also works with US-based training provider The Growth Partnership, sending future managers to its The Reluctant Salesperson course. “My weakness has always been in the marketing or sales side,” says Bill Gill, partner at MacKay. “How can I as an accountant develop clients? That’s the kind of sales training I’m looking for.”

Five to 10 years into a career, the focus shifts and becomes much more people-centric, says Jim King, national director of professional practice at Collins Barrow, an association of 21 member firms across the country, many of them smaller firms. “Now that we’ve been through the adoption of IFRS and private entity GAAP and we are becoming comfortable with them, we are seeing a growing demand for leadership training, communication and team-building skills training,” says King. “People who have a few years in practice under their belts want and need the so-called soft skills so critical in today’s business environment.”

For good reason. There has been an ongoing shift from the very hierarchical organization where the boss would say jump and you asked how high, to today’s organization, where the leader doesn’t decide everything and is much more of a coach, says Bill Greenhalgh, CEO of the Human Resources Professionals Association, which offers some 200 professional development programs a year, including courses on project management, talent acquisition and retention, team building, coaching and performance management — all open to CAs. “How do you create the right organizational culture?” he says. “Twenty years ago employee engagement wasn’t of major interest. Today the best talent has an incredible number of options.”

This shift coincides with the evolution of the CA’s role, which is much more managerial today than it was 20 or 30 years ago. “CAs act as consultants to companies; they look at strategy and the implications of it,” says Greenhalgh. “When you look at what it takes to execute a strategy, you need the right people on the bus, the right skill sets, the right culture, the right motivation. These are people issues that CAs need to be concerned with.”

Where to turn for continuing professional development

In June, the CICA launched the CA Learning Centre (www.calearningcentre.ca), a web portal that is the central hub of all of its professional development activities. “We record most sessions at our conferences and most of our continuing education events and presentations and unbundle them so you can log in, create a profile and access what you need,” says Frank Colantonio, CICA director of continuing education. “You can also register for conferences and access articles and white papers. As well, we are going to keep your electronic bookcase for you, so the information is always there and you can stream it or download it whenever you like.”

The provincial institutes also provide an extensive suite of continuing education programs. And many universities and colleges offer continuing executive education programs both in residence and via distance learning. As well, many of the large and midsize accounting and law firms offer free seminars and webinars. In September, Deloitte launched the Deloitte Learning Academy, a web-based application that is open to the public for a fee.

Here is a sample of other continuing professional development sources:
CRA: www.cra-arc.gc.ca
Canadian Association of Family Enterprise:
www.cafecanada.ca
Conference Board of Canada: www.conferenceboard.ca
CIO Association of Canada: www.ciocan.ca
Federated Press: www.federatedpress.com
Financial Accounting Standards Board: www.fasb.org
Financial Executives International: www.feicanada.org
Financial Management Institute of Canada: www.fmi.ca
Government Finance Officers Association: www.gfoa.com
Human Resources Professionals Association: www.hrpa.ca
Institute of International Auditors: www.theiia.org
IFRS Foundation and International Accounting Standards Board: www.ifrs.org
International Federation of Accountants: www.ifac.org
IT Alliance: cax.org
Treasury Management Association of Canada:
tmac-toronto.ca

Beyond talent management, increasingly professional development is focused on what goes into decision-making. “We spend a lot of time talking about operational, reputational and quantitative risk and the impact of rapid change and turbulent environments on the kinds of business decisions being made in our executive programs,” says Gandz. “The time from 2008 to today has seen a lot of uncertainty, so we talk much more about strategic options rather than strategies cast in stone. Certainly there is more humility about being right and greater focus on making good decisions but recognizing that circumstances vary greatly.” In other words, he says, judgment is used.

When it comes to CAs, says Gandz, they are looking for a connection with their customers and to understand the business not just from their role as CAs but as their clients see it. “It’s the real connection to the broad world of business. They want to understand and feel what their clients are feeling and dealing with. The best accountants have always been wired that way.”

What the Big Four are doing
Alan Booth, associate partner, learning at Deloitte, agrees. “Clients assume you are going to be technically good. What they are looking for is your point of view and we are seeing demand for learning geared to helping them shape that point of view.”

As a result, Deloitte is developing programs to help its people build industry eminence. “Clients perceive themselves in terms of the industry they live in,” he says. “They are interested in more than an audit or risk assessment. At the more senior levels, industry eminence means you understand what the players’ agendas and strategies are and you get to the point where you can help clients make sense of the forces that shape the trends.” How do you gain industry eminence? “A CA needs to understand where the clients are going for information — industry associations and journals, websites, commentators — and connect themselves to the same sources,” says Booth. “That’s how you build the foundational knowledge of an industry. Beyond that, there are a lot of vendors out there that can deliver good learning around negotiating skills, communications skills and relationship-building skills.”

Another key component of leadership training is coaching and mentoring, and increasingly firms are tapping into their own knowledge base by positioning partners to be coaches to guide those on their way up. As a result, the ability to share knowledge to develop others and give feedback is important. “One of the pieces we are focused on is ensuring there is transfer of learning so that the learning lives and breathes on the job,” says Connal. “How do we arm everyone to support the application of learning on the job? How do we deliver learning so our people can get it when they need it?”

Ernst & Young offers internal courses to help its people improve their coaching abilities. “When CAs move into more senior management positions, we have a three- or four-day training period to prepare them for this role,” says Charles Marful, director, Canada people team, assurance practice at Ernst & Young. “Everyone here has a counselor or coach and coaching is something that everyone has to be good at. We look at people development in three pillars: formal learning, which is the courses you take; experience; and coaching, which involves sharing insights and experiences with others so they can learn. Coaching is the glue that ties the formal learning and the experience together.”

And it goes hand in hand with another trend in professional development: the growth of on-the-job, informal learning opportunities. For example, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is using a structured, team-based approach to learning on the job. “It’s a way to capture teachable moments as they arise and in the process help accelerate the development of our junior people and reinforce learning on the job,” says Kate Hand, learning and development director for national assurance practice at PwC Canada. “Rather than stop and have someone attend a seminar or elearn session, we now have a structure and specific techniques we can use when an opportunity arises. So we’ve addressed the learning gap and provided feedback and support. As a result our junior team members have more opportunities to take on more rewarding work. As well, it improves communication across the team because you are coming together to address issues in a real-time, real-life, relevant way.”

For example, this fall PwC launched a program dealing with professional skepticism that blends a formal learning component with the team-based learning approach. “How do you teach judgment? By sharing war stories of near misses,” says Hand. “Our senior team members have these stories but they might not always think to share them with junior team members. Now, they can come together to talk about what professional skepticism means for the client, how to address it and assess it and what to do when something is unusual. Junior team members might not otherwise have the confidence to question a client.”

Technology
Ray Desjardins, CA•IT, and his wife, Donna, set up Desjardins & Co. as a sole proprietorship in 1979 in St. Paul, Alta. It was the first firm in the region, if not the province, to embrace microcomputers for accounting and bookkeeping. “As accounting software for microcomputers started becoming available, we became certified consultants for Simply Accounting, QuickBooks, BusinessVision, NewViews, etc.,” says Desjardins. “Many, many years ago, I attended one of the early CICA micro conferences, where the head speaker warned CAs that the ‘technology locomotive is coming down the track and if we don’t get on very soon we’ll be left behind.’ ”

Far from being left behind, Desjardins obtained his information technology specialist certification in 2004. Still, professional development in the area of technology, particularly as a specialist, is hard to come by, he says. “My IT professional development education has to come from seminars, conferences and webinars offered by vendors of software and hardware, online courses offered through, for example, CICA Extensions and SmartPDOnline, along with conferences of IT professionals who are not necessarily chartered accountants.” Additionally, he says there are a number of trade and other publications (many of them available at no charge) as well as websites such as www.cnet.com that offer good information relating to the latest trends and products.

Desjardins also makes extensive use of the IT Alliance CA-Xchange (CAX) (www.cax.org), an online forum, where he also serves as a moderator and TechTips author, that helps CAsacross the country access informal, shared-experience-type learning around technology.

It was at CAX that Desjardins met Dwayne Bragonier, CA•IT, of BAI Bragonier & Associates Inc. in Mississauga, Ont., which provides technology training to public accountants on the systemized use of tools and software. “CAX is a peer-to-peer online learning network where people can post questions and get answers from others who have dealt with the same issues,” Bragonier says. He points out that although CA•ITs need structured learning, now, thanks to technology, they have a forum to communicate their mistakes and successes.

“We start with structure and then we talk to one another,” says Bragonier. “It’s what the large accounting firms have always done, but now that ability is available to CAs widely. That’s what CAX is about. The social net is providing us that forum and learning opportunity. From a professional development perspective, it’s going to be interesting to see what happens in the next 10 years. We are learning how to share and how to learn from people sharing — online.”

Social media
Of course, the reach of the social net and social networking goes well beyond technology and how we learn. It also has implications for how business is conducted. “Talks around the water cooler were the earliest forms of social networking. It is relevant now to the areas of marketing, crisis management, reputational management, management of information and misinformation,” says Gandz. Social networking cannot be ignored and CAs have to be thinking about it and learning how to use it, he says. “It is producing fascinating accounting questions, not the least of which is, how can LinkedIn be worth billions when it hasn’t made any money?”

And CAs are thinking about it. “As a firm, we are looking at the options and re-evaluating where we want to go on this road,” says Gill. “Most of our staff is savvy and thinks it’s something we should be doing. The question is how to use it effectively.”

Deloitte is also seeing a lot of interest in social media, particularly among newer CAs who have been much more connected and are comfortable using social media in their personal lives. “The trick is to discern useful insight from speculative commentary,” says Booth. “At the moment social media is being used as an information tool to keep abreast of what’s happening with clients and industry and within the profession.”

That was exactly what drew Iacovetta to the CICA’s social networking course. “It’s a personal interest and it is a great tool to help you stay connected,” she says. And the fact that the course is one way to meet the continuing professional development requirement is fitting. “As a CA working in industry, the CPD requirement is my link to the broader CA community,” says Iacovetta.

“Becoming a CA is a rigorous process and I know I bring depth to the table because of my training,” she says. “The profession itself requires that you continue to move forward and prove yourself. Lifelong learning is part of that process and it’s important to me personally. I see professional development as a way to stay connected to the profession and my colleagues and to continue to push myself in my own continuous learning.”

Mary Teresa Bitti is a freelance writer based in Oakville, Ont.