Accountancy

Accountancy is another role within the finance sector that is currently suffering from significant skills shortages. A recent survey by Finance Magazine revealed that the top 20 accountancy firms hired 2,082 new staff from June 2006 to June 2007, and planned to hire a further 2,260 employees during the period June 2007 to June 2008, swelling the number of accountants to over 10,000 in the top 20 firms alone. In such a competitive jobs market it’s no surprise that graduates are frequently offered excellent incentives, in the form of bonuses and perks, by employers seeking fresh recruits. Some firms are offering bonuses of up to one quarter of basic annual pay. There has never been a better time to pursue a career in accountancy.

But a legitimate question for a graduate of accountancy could well be, ‘why should I delay plunging into such an enticing jobs market by pursuing a postgraduate qualification?’ It is possible after all to work full-time and earn your professional qualifications during the evening.

’Well, if you do an undergraduate programme in accountancy or commerce,’ says Peter Melinn, Head of the Dept of Accountancy in Athlone Institute of Technology, ‘you get certain exemptions from the accountancy bodies, ACCA (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) or ICAI (Institute of Chartered Accountants in Ireland). But if you do the MA in Accounting, you get additional exemptions. So the benefit is getting the MA and additional exemptions. I know from talking to people in accountancy firms, they actually sponsor people to do the MA and then they provide employment. It means the firm doesn’t have to give them the same study leave as if they had two or three professional exams left to do.’

It’s not all about exemptions from the professional exams however, the thesis programme carried out during the MA in Accounting teaches students how to perform and report effective research. As Ronan O’Brien of the ICAI points out: ‘Typically chartered accountants will need to research and understand their client’s business, the various possible accounting and tax treatments allowed and the research and writing skills will be key elements in “adding value”.’

’Students would not come across research anywhere at all in the professional exams,’ says Peter Melinn, and he finds that although ‘students don’t like doing it initially, when they finish their thesis and see it bound – there’s a strong element of pride in their work. Talking to students who graduated last year, they were all glad they had completed the mini-thesis.’

So the research work helps with the development of different skills? ‘Absolutely correct,’ he affirms, ‘one of the things accountants are criticised for at times is poor communication and writing skills and this would certainly help them with that.’ Encouraging skills and knowledge that are not purely accountancy based is another feature of the MA. Of AIT’s programme, Peter Melinn says, ‘we took a decision at the very start that we wouldn’t confine the research to a pure accountancy topic – we would broaden it out to general business.’ Thus last year’s MA students researched topics as widely variant as Internet banking and sports accounting.

AIT’s strong reputation in accountancy has been built up during many years of providing undergraduate and professional qualifications. 2006/2007 was the first year of the MA programme and it ‘went very well’ according to Peter Melinn, with graduates now working in firms such as Ernst & Young. ‘It’s a good thing to have in the midlands, prior to this if students wanted to do an MA they had to go to Dublin or Galway and competition for places there is pretty keen obviously.’

Postgraduate accounting MAs are also provided in the UCD Michael Smurfit School of Business, which features a very strong IT component – including a full time computing lecturer and dedicated course-specific servers; and NUI Galway, which has been impressively endorsed by Colm Gorman, Head of KPMG. Students of DIT’s MSc in Accounting & Finance must take two modules from outside the core accounting modules, the choice being: Strategic Management, Business Information Systems, Taxation, and Auditing.

Waterford IT’s Accounting MBS is designed to create accountants who take ‘a proactive role in strategic management and corporate decision-making activities’. The Master of Arts in Accounting is available on a full time and part time basis in Letterkenny IT, and the programme’s quality is reflected by the fact that sponsors of graduates have included the likes of Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers.

With the healthy state of the current jobs market, it is possible for people with no third level accountancy specialisation to acquire an accountancy role and pursue their professional qualification at night through an evening class. An attractive alternative to this route is the accountancy conversion course available in DIT, DCU and UCC. The Higher Diploma in Accounting & Corporate Finance in UCC for example, accepts students from a wide variety of backgrounds, including degree holders from law, sociology and science. All you need, according to Maeve McCutcheon, the Course Director in UCC, is a certainty that is what you want to do and ‘a good head for figures’.

She believes ‘it would probably take about three years’ for someone to acquire on a part time basis the equivalent qualifications that the one-year full time conversion course provides exemption from. Studying at night while holding down a full time job ‘would be very demanding and quite a big workload’. Apart from getting through the exemptions quicker, the ‘total immersion’ of the Higher Diploma course provides students with a stronger foundation in accountancy knowledge than the strictly role-based professional exam classes.

The graduates of UCC’s Higher Diploma in Accountancy are certainly proving popular with employers, with the big accountancy firms in particular harbouring ‘quite an appetite for people with different backgrounds’, according to Maeve McCutcheon.