Professional Accounting Qualifications – The Good, The Bad, The Ugly
I have a professional accounting qualification, is it all it's advertised to be?
It took me eleven years to complete my professional accounting qualification.
I studied part time, worked full time, studied at night, weekends, made huge sacrifices. I did my articles, (my training contract), after my post grad and qualified as a Chartered Accountant at the age of 28.
I guess that I had believed (and most students that I work with have the same unarticulated belief) that the day you qualify, everything will be okay, you will ‘be’ successful. You are so used to being on a path, and the only goal you can see is getting those letters behind your name that you’re not actually thinking of what comes after that.
The characteristics of professional qualifications include 3 components:
- Specific academic requirements
- Formal training contracts to verify on-the-job competencies
- A professional institution that governs its’ members, ethics and development.
This has distinct positives, but I also feel they have some not-so-obvious negatives.
This is not to say that I believe that a qualification isn’t worth the effort, or that it’s not valuable. I’m not throwing the entire concept out the window. I’m merely trying to bring balance to the discussion and expectations we have about what qualifications can do for us and our careers, and some of the things we need to be cautious of.
Why should we consider this?
The positives of qualifications, especially a professional accounting qualification, are pretty well-known, so I haven’t really focussed on them. When you read these things, it’s easy to feel that I have a deep resentment of what my qualification process has left me with.
I think the truth of this is that I SERIOUSLY brought into the salvation that the qualification would give me. I was very fear-based, had been brought up with certain experiences, and with constant financial stresses, it was inevitable that I would search for something that would prevent me from experiencing these challenges in my future. I so desperately wanted to be financially secure in the future, employed, and have good opportunities, that the benefits the qualification represented were lifelines that I clung to with earnest desperation.
I knew no other professionals, so there was no sense of balance, no ‘real’ people to give me a more balanced perspective. Our culture in South Africa also encourages the idea that education will be our saviour if we’re not ‘born’ with these advantages.
I had a natural inferiority complex, so the idea of ‘hiding’ behind the value and credibility of a professions’ status and value was pretty attractive. I couldn’t be successful on my own!
These probably explain some of the reasons that I bought so heavily into the absolute value of the professional accounting qualification. It took me years and a lot of struggles as I moved into different roles and realised that I was not able to move forward in those newer roles, to realise that there were dynamics and beliefs about the qualification and the side-effects of these, that had a part to play in the gaps I was experiencing.
I’ve lectured and worked with students on professional accounting qualification journeys for over 15 years, and the reality is that I see the same challenges in their journeys that I had. Obviously, to lesser and greater extents, depending on their backgrounds, experiences and personalities, but none of the challenges I discuss are things that I haven’t seen and helped students and young accounting professionals with more times than I care to remember.
My point? There are positives and negatives to EVERYTHING in life. When we’re IN situations, it can be difficult to have a balanced view of both sides of this. The more we’ve brought into the benefits and have expectations of what it will do for us, the less we may want to think of the possible down-sides. Growth, and new situations, require self-awareness and for us to assess our strengths and weaknesses, things we need to work on, and skills we can leverage. This is not always comfortable, but it is important.
I needed to see my qualification in a more balanced way, and actively work on the gaps I’d identified, in order to move into new phases of my career and entrepreneurial journey
External Validation
The Good?
The day you qualify is the day you realize that you’re supposed to have the world at your feet. You’ve studied this qualification with the understanding that the marketplace values it, that they will value you, offer you great opportunities. In a way, it’s an external stamp of approval on your CV that tells potential employees: “Don’t worry, she can do this!”.
I felt that people would see the qualification I had, and anything about me personally would be an added bonus. Basically, they’d be hiring the qualification, and get the ‘person’ behind it. I was always filled with self-doubt, and lacked confidence, so the idea that I could have a verifiable qualification to ‘prove’ that I was competent was really attractive!
This is one of the powerful attractions of a professional accounting qualification. The ‘external’ validation of your skills and abilities. You effectively get a stamp of approval that tells future employers that you are ‘certified’ and able to perform certain tasks. As long as you study at an accredited education institution, and work at an accredited company, you will get THE SAME qualification as others. So even the choice of employers and where to study has less of an impact on you. You’re within a safety net that the profession has created for you. Wherever you study, wherever you work, you’ll get the same stamp of approval.
As long as the profession has credibility and status within the marketplace, you will benefit from that credibility.
The Bad?
The very validation that you find attractive, often creates a sense of dependency that can be detrimental for you. You’re so focussed on what the profession, what someone else, identifies as valuable, that you don’t develop a sense of your own value. You place your sense of value externally. You’re waiting for someone else to stamp their approval on you. If they don’t give you that validation, it’ll be very difficult to find it for yourself. There are such specific milestones, that are (and need to be) measurable, but these mean that you’re constantly measuring and comparing your value, intelligence and ability by someone else’s’ requirements and standards, and with a tough qualification journey, you are going to fall short of that at some point.
Once the qualification journey is over, once you have that final stamp, you find yourself still needing approval and external validation. You’ve gotten used to being externally measured, and this is now less structured. Your path after qualification will vary so much from those around you, is far less structured, and you’re more ‘alone’ in your journey. You need to find and acknowledge your own value, and you haven’t really developed that skill or habit.
The Ugly?
The ‘ugly’ part of this is that it’s a little like being in a relationship where you’re constantly needing validation and approval from your partner. You’re not able to give it to yourself and settle in your own sense of value. Sadly, even if you get daily validation, because it’s not internalised, you will always need more, never feel good enough, and no amount of external validation fills that void. This may seem a strange analogy for your career, but our careers are very emotional journeys for us. We don’t go through a qualification process to have ‘just a job’ where we clock hours, go home and forget about it. We’re emotionally invested in our careers and futures. Our sense of self and value is closely tied to our success and progress.
Waiting for approval and validation and measurement from others is dangerous, and the habit is easy to fall into. It impacts the decisions we make, the anxiety we approach life and work with, and often means we’re less likely to reach out, because we’re waiting for someone else to tell us we’re ‘ready’ to do so.
My journey with this?
The more that I stepped away from the corporate ladder environment, the more the qualification became irrelevant. I shifted from relying on it for employment, to leveraging the skills, knowledge, experience and contacts I’d developed through the years. (Which is probably what professions intend in the first place!)
It was very challenging to find my own value. To state, own, acknowledge and use skills, abilities and learning that I felt was relevant for what I was going to be doing, was tough. There was no more external validation, but I still needed it. I struggled to take the next step because I was waiting for some ‘sign’ that it would be the right one.
I struggled to see value in my own skills and abilities outside of the qualification. It would’ve been a lot easier to stay within an environment that provided that validation, to whatever extent. When you’re working on your own, you need to provide your own validation, and the challenges of building your own business mean that ‘success’ is tricky to find, most days are filled with some type of failure, and you have to believe that your work and choices will pay off, but you have to accept that it’s unlikely to be today. You won’t be able to get that stamp of approval, whatever that looks like, for quite some time. (Most new businesses take 18 – 24 months to get off the ground. That’s a LOT of days you’re working through that don’t feel like success!)
I also felt like I had no value outside of the profession. I had worked so hard to get the qualification, and I felt that it was all I had. I couldn’t see any skills or knowledge that would be valuable outside of that, because that’s all I focussed on for so long! I only had value IN that space. This obviously makes it far easier to be ‘trapped’ in that place. You’re afraid that you won’t be able to survive outside of the qualification and profession, so you stay within the classic boundaries, roles, jobs etc.
As I started stepping outside that professional zone, I realised how alone I was, and the feeling of obsolescence hit me hard. I panicked that I would have nothing to offer anyone if it wasn’t part of my professional role. That no one would want me.
Realising, albeit slowly, that I had a wealth of possibility that had nothing to do with my qualification, while still leveraging off of the skills and experience, was an interesting and tough lesson, and I’m still working on that!
