Professional accountants understand the importance of continuous learning. However, to be compliant with the requirements of the law that learning needs to be expensive is something that we simply could not embrace. There’s a lot of clamor around the various professions to trash out the law due to absurd amounts that needs to be spent just to maintain their professional license. If they are complaining, why shouldn’t we accountants complain when we have the highest level of required Continuing Professional Development (CPD) units over a three-year rolling period?
To paint the picture of cost, the average cost of an eight-hour CPD course in the country is roughly P1,500. That would roughly amount to around P22,500 over a three-year period. However, that’s not the whole picture yet. The incremental costs of attending a CPD course would mean a day off work, self-sponsored travel expense, plus loads of travel time wasted to attend training courses in the Metro. Taking into account all these other costs would work out a loss of roughly P100,000 just to comply with the requirements.
The million-peso question is this —shouldn’t we trash this law just yet? My response is no. The high cost of compliance, inaccessible course locations and poor course selection is the real issue that we need to address as a profession. This is changing though.
We’ve seen several companies, institutions and even review centers sprouting everywhere like mushrooms and applying to be a CPD provider since 2017. We know that the opportunity is there, but the same problem still applies.
Looking at the current marketplace, there are already some companies starting to offer online format CPD courses. This is a great improvement that we’re seeing here in the country that professionals have begun to think about using technology to address the issues mentioned above.
Over the past six months, our team has been working diligently to address this pressing issue. We have been curating and discussing with professional speakers both within and outside our profession to create a curated catalogue of courses. We’ve done a great deal of research, as well in understanding what international certification bodies expect when it comes to electronic format of delivering online courses.
Continuing professional education institutions around the world that are offering online strictly ensure that students are actively participating throughout the length of the webinar through assessments or polling questions inserted every so often. Further, the length of each course should be at most 90 minutes and scheduled into several parts for online learning to be effective. And, finally, the CPD providers need to make sure that systems of checks and controls are in place when issuing certificates.
After all the efforts we’ve have completed several online CPD modules taking into account the inputs from consultations with senior stakeholders and educators. We have built a membership based e-CPD site, which offers extensive course selections from industry experts, from accounting to branding to taxation. All this at a fair fee for our members.
Learning online should be more than just about getting the certificate. It’s about real learning from topics that you are interested in while making sure that you get the benefit of a community similar to attending CPD courses—that’s why we have planned activities and live CPD courses for our platform members for them to look forward to.
Filbert Tsai is the chief strategy officer of continu.ee, a membership-based e-learning platform for professionals that provides quality continuing professional education courses. He is also the chief strategist at UpSmart Strategy Consulting Inc., a corporate troubleshooting firm focusing on helping struggling companies get back to its normal operations.
This column accepts contributions from accountants, especially articles that are of interest to the accountancy profession, in particular, and to the business community, in general. These can be e-mailed to boa.secretariat.@gmail.com.