Skills required of banking and accounting professionals are changing fast amid growing automation and wide use of artificial intelligence in the field, which are bring used to do away with mundane and repetitive tasks. In this scenario, there is a growing clamour to reskill among accounting professionals to insulate themselves from being made redundant.
The new focus is on becoming tech-savvy and improving analytical skills. The reskilling is taking place through number of courses and certifications—offered either in classrooms and online.
Some of these courses, which are expected to grow in demand in 2020, include:
1. Certified Management Accountants
The demand for certified management accountants (CMA) remains hot as ever. A CMA stamp has always been a pass to rising up the corporate ladder, something a person trained in plain vanilla accountancy does not easily get. CMAs work, not on boring audit reports and tax returns, but shaping tricky business strategies through deep financial analysis – thereby helping a company improve its performance and its bottomline.
According to a 2019 global survey by the International Management Association (IMA), certified management accountants earn more than double the amount given to uncertified accountants.
2. Data Analytics
Gleaming insights from large amounts of data is becoming crucial to make business decisions and accounting professionals are taking to it naturally. The course is helping them move from balance sheets to mastering statistical techniques using Python and R, thereby learning to find new business trends, risks and market intelligence.
3. Corporate Law
Once the domain of lawyers, today’s accountants are also expected to know the nuts and bolts of laws that govern activities of firms and corporations in different countries. The courses are providing them advanced knowledge of corporate and securities law that they can use to help managements take informed decisions and avoid potentially wrong moves.
4. Forensic Auditing
A simple company audit is not enough today, given the rate at which frauds are being detected in account books of companies, making regulators seek the help of forensic auditors. There accountants are also today learning the tricks of fraud detection. The demand for such auditors has also grown due to rising cases of cybercrimes.
In these courses, one learns to be a financial investigator and find facts about the fraud and collect evidences for further action.
