PACE Academic IG

Introduction

Accounting provides several opportunities for certification.  Each certification opportunity helps professionals organize their career path.  For me, the Certified Management Accountant (CMA) certification is the best for organizing my career path.

Organization

The CMA certification has helped me organize my career path in three ways:

1.     Perspective

2.     Vision

3.     Flexibility

Perspective  

My career has covered a lot of ground: Private industry, private practice, and education.  Within each element, I acquired a greater understanding and appreciation of an “inside to outside” point of view.  My experience in private industry built of foundation for where I am today.  Today, I am an adjunct professor who has worked in education for 18 years, and my private practice allows me to develop accounting systems for my clients.  It is today’s work that validates my decision to become a CMA.

Being a CMA reminds me that it is about helping management make better decisions.  Better decision making occurs when management sees the strengths and weaknesses within their companies and respond accordingly.  Strengths allow companies to pursue opportunities, but weaknesses must not be ignored.  Management can only keep weaknesses inside for a limited time.  Once the weaknesses affect others outside of the company the weaknesses will hinder the company’s ability to exist over the long term.

What the CMA has allowed me to pursue is the continuing education to help me help management make better decisions.  The organization that supports the CMA, the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA), provides a competency framework to help CMA’s with their continuing education.  I have taken advantage of many elements within the framework, and my focus is on the Emerging Technologies in Accounting element.  Keeping up to date with technology, combined with my experience in people and processes, allows me to provide the best in accounting systems development.  By providing the best in accounting systems development I can help management see clearly from the inside before pursuing opportunities that exist on the outside.

Vision

One of the biggest criticisms of accounting is vision, i.e., the vision looks backward.  In my opinion, this criticism has provided opportunities for analytics to have a greater impact on management’s decision making.  My response to this criticism is to demonstrate how management accounting looks forward.  I have found this response to be quite easy to make.  My response is in topics presented in one of the courses I teach, managerial accounting.

When teaching managerial accounting, I divide the course into 3 sections: Cost Accounting, Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A), and Decision-Making.  In a future post, I will describe each section in greater detail.  A reason for dividing the course in this manner is help students bring a forward mindset to the job.  This mindset will help people inside the companies that employ my students provide the ultimate in leadership, improving the well-being of others.  Improvement cannot affect the past because the past cannot be changed, but the future can be better with the use of an appropriate mindset.

What the CMA has allowed me to strengthen is my vision for looking forward.  Once again, the Competency Framework within the IMA provides vision in 2 areas: Strategy, Planning, and Performance; Reporting and Control.  Both areas of the framework allow me to develop accounting systems that provide thinking, doing, and learning to happen together in ways that help management realize a better tomorrow.  The realization of a better tomorrow occurs when a function inside companies unites all elements of a company to work together in achieving a better tomorrow.  What life has taught me is management accounting provides the vision to look forward in ways that not only see but also achieve a better future.

Flexibility

Change has been an integral part of my life.  Whether it is personally or professionally, my life experience can be described as broad and deep.  It is the breadth of my life, especially professionally, that has allowed me to respond accordingly to change.  Unless something happens, the biggest change I see professionally is artificial intelligence (AI).  AI has certainly raised concerns about tomorrow, but one thing AI has done is provide more flexibility for myself and my students.  The flexibility for myself is in the development of accounting systems, but for me, I have flexibility in how I teach management accounting to my students.

Management accounting is a combination of financial accounting and managerial accounting, the two courses that I primarily teach.  What may come as a surprise is I do not teach many accounting majors; finance, management, and marketing majors have dominated the rosters I teach.  The makeup of my rosters by major allows me to connect accounting to their majors that build on the education that will help them achieve their professional goals.  What the connection also provides is opportunities for students to add accounting as a minor or a double major.  The opportunities to add accounting as a minor or a double major provides another path, a path that leads to companies looking for people who have fresh ideas.

What the CMA has allowed me to do is keep an open mind toward other subjects.  Of course, accounting is an important study, but the Competency Framework within the IMA provides tremendous flexibility through its Business Acumen and Operations element.  This element is a win for me and a win for my students.  For me, the win is to develop accounting systems that truly unite all stakeholders, and for my students, the win is the ability to adapt to change.  Adapting to change is real, and for me, adapting to change has been easier because of being a CMA.

Conclusion

Over the last several years, accounting has faced many challenges.  The emergence of analytics and AI have only made the challenges more visible.  The visibility of the challenges can be ignored or acknowledged, and I acknowledge the challenges.  By my work with clients and students, I want accounting to help people improve the well-being of others. For me, improving the well-being of others applies to people inside companies, and improving the well-being of companies by improving the well-being of people is something I hope accountants, students or professionals, will pursue by becoming a CMA, because this pursuit is the reason why I became a CMA.

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