On July 10, 2018, the event that many have been preparing for will come. Countless sleepless nights, thousands of hours spent reading and crunching numbers on the calculator and a few teardrops of frustration for unsolvable problems will then be rewarded as the passers of the May 2018 Certified Public Accountants will be taking their oath as professionals. We’ve all been there. I’ve gone through that, and here you are—marching your way and taking your oath as a freshly minted CPA. Take pride, because you made it. You have just completed what is referred to as the Initial Professional Development (IPD) by the International Education Standards 7 (IES 7).
I can still remember writing a similar article last year for the November 2017 batch in the BusinessMirror. Our profession had just entered its 95th year and, this year, we’ll be welcoming our diamond anniversary CPAs into our fold. Just like diamond, the profession had been very selective, with a passing rate of roughly 30 percent for this batch, with only the best and the brightest sifted through the sieve. Indeed, you have studied and prepared well for the next phase of your professional life.
Becoming a CPA is just the first step in your professional life. Competition will get tighter once you start working. It is a matter of upholding the #HighestStandard and commitment to #ExpandingHorizons in order to stand out among professionals that you’ll meet in the workplace. In fact, these two hashtags are the key themes that the Board of Accountancy (BOA) has been pursuing over the past three years as part of its six-point strategic agenda.
Continuing professional development (CPD) naturally follows IPD and is a requirement of IES 7 for professional accountants to maintain and enhance their competence and relevance in the profession. With the ever-changing business landscape and professional standards, professionals need to continually be upskilled to be able to deliver work necessary for the modern day. The BOA will soon introduce five new topics into the licensure examination (effective in the May 2019 licensure examination) to respond to the needs of the profession, namely:
- Globalization;
- Digital disruption;
- Global regulatory trends on governance and ethics;
- Effective business communication; and
- Regulatory requirements and considerations;
As can be seen, there is a shift in the focus of the examination from purely technical accounting topics to general business knowledge. As BOA Chairman Joel Tan-Torres mentioned in his regulatory updates course presented at www.continu.ee, we need to continually watch out for these disruptions before we get disrupted ourselves.
Continuously developing the professional competence of an individual is a shared responsibility between the individual, the individual’s employer and the regulator. Lucky are those who get to work in large global firms that do provide quality learning to ensure all firm members are abreast of global trends—but for others, it’s more of a personal responsibility to put forward your own learning objective.
Good thing is, online learning is becoming mainstream, which allows students to select the topics they’re interested in and take the course on-demand. There’s a lot of great online learning platforms out in the market, such as EdX, Coursera and Lynda for international certifications, and of course, if you want to #continuee2learn here in the Philippines, www.continu.ee powered by OpenEdX is a great platform to use for local courses that entitle you to CPD credits using a trusted EdX platform.
To our soon to be CPAs, congratulations. Welcome to the professional world. Your adventure has just begun.
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.
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.