Discover a Career: Chartered Accountant

Are you planning to become a Chartered Accountant (CA)? Chartered Accountancy or Certified Public Accountant (CPA) or CA has been a widely occupied profession worldwide. While chartered accountancy education may seem tough to many, the scopes of gaining success and earning a good income are huge. Besides, the demand for a professional CA is also increasing globally over time as there are more businesses and people getting financially aware. So, no matter where you are, you can easily excel in your career with a chartered accountant education and professional practice.

However, it is advisable to make an informed decision on becoming a CA, rather than blindly going for it. After all, chartered accountancy is a professional course and is highly technical, which requires a keen understanding of accountancy and an educational degree in the same. Now, if you plan to become a highly paid CA, you need to understand what a CA does and delve into details regarding this profession. Good news! You do not have to discover this career on your own, as everything you need to know to inform your decision is right here.

What is Charted Accountancy?

Being a chartered accountant demands the examining of the financial information of individual clients (B2C), Corporate clients (B2B) and other governmental institutions (B2G) when you’re working at a higher level in the position of CA. The position of a chartered accountant is granted to accounting professionals in most global countries. However, let’s talk about large countries like the United States. The position of CA is only granted to certified public accountants who have a prior educational background in this profession. Simply put, the services and tasks of a chartered accountant are to offer his/her specialist accountant services along with business advice. These services and advice fall in a range of important areas of the industrial world.

While most people consider an accountant and a chartered accountant to be the same, they are different professions as chartered accountancy comprises a higher education and more experience than that of a normal accountant. Additionally, a chartered accountant is considered an important professional person in the industrial and business world.

Top Skills and Education Level Required:

Once you understand the role of a chartered accountant, you need to understand the skills and education level required to become one. As mentioned earlier, a chartered accountant serves as a more professional and demanded personality in the professional world, demanding high qualification. But that is certainly not all, as the qualities of a chartered accountant also make him/her a more in demand and an efficient personality in the business world. Hence, before you consider becoming a chartered accountant, it is important to understand what essential skills and educational degrees you need in your portfolio to professionally reach that position.

Education:

First, let us talk about the educational requirements for a chartered accountant. Being a chartered accountant, you need to have a higher qualification than that of a normal accountant. Although different countries have different educational requirements for hiring a chartered accountant, most of them require you to:

• Study accounting, business/commerce, or business
• Achieve bachelor’s degree in the same subjects
• Have a master’s degree in the same

According to professional sources, 65% of chartered accountants hold a bachelor’s degree, while 14% hold a master’s degree. This also means that lesser high-level and highly qualified chartered accountants are present in the professional world globally.

Other Skills:

Apart from the educational demands of becoming a well acclaimed and professional chartered accountant, your skills and abilities to perform the tasks effectively matter a lot. To be well rounded, an educational degree is not enough. Besides, many more skills help you become better professionally, no matter what profession you opt for, and it is the same for chartered accountancy. These skills include:

• Accountancy:

A crucial task and skill required in a chartered accountant is the skill of accountancy. Hence, you need to practice and advance your skills and gather tangible experience in accountancy to become a more professional accountant.

• Arithmetic:

You cannot be a sharp and talented chartered accountant if you lack the basic or advanced level skills of arithmetic (calculations). Besides, when this is your primary job function, it is important to practice more in calculations than the basic accountants.

• Analytical Skills:

Another crucial skill you can practice and participate in is the improvement of your analytical skills. Without high-level analytical skills, it can be hard to extract useful information from gigabytes of data. Being a chartered accountant, you may need to perform various analyses according to the data and facts provided by the clients. For this, the skill of using popular software’s like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets along with a clear understanding of performing basic and detailed analysis on them is also much needed.

• Software Operation:

Most of the chartered accountancy work is performed on software for a more advanced and efficient outcome. Hence, learning the essential software and its usage according to the job is also necessary. Some of the most popular and most utilized software’s in this field include Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, Fresh Book, Xero, etc. Hence, it is important to know the basics and advanced uses/controls of these essential software needed in this professional field.

• Effective Communication Skills:

Since you mostly deal with various clients as a chartered accountant, it is important to have professional and reliable communication with the clients. Hence, focusing and improving on your communication skills for a compelling conversation with clients is much needed in this profession.

• Good Team Player:

When working as a chartered accountant, you are not just working as a sole person or business owner. Instead, you are a crucial part of a whole team in the accounting industry, which requires proper team coordination and skills to cope with the team more effectively while working.

Salary Comparison:

Even when one is passionate about choosing a specific profession, it ends up getting rejected because of the low salary package it offers. However, we can’t say the same for chartered accountant jobs, as this is a much-demanded profession nowadays. Therefore, let’s compare the average salary of this profession in all the major countries below:

Expected Future Growth:

Like any in-demand and highly skilled professions who provides primary services, chartered accounting is also a crucial profession in today’s business world. Many businesses, individuals and governmental organizations require chartered accountants, making it a highly demanded profession nowadays.

However, if we investigate software adoptions, artificial intelligence and automation, most people consider chartered accountancy to be a present profession only. Yet, the demand for chartered accountants keeps increasing! Despite the rise in AI and automation, experts suggest that the demand for chartered accountancy will increase as the upcoming technology will revolutionize accounting. As a result, this may create more jobs for chartered accountants than it will destroy, making the scope of your career grow over time.

Famous Charted Accountants:

Now, if you are in doubt or need inspiration from some of the most popular and successful chartered accountants, here are some popular chartered accountants.

• Olusegun Olutoyin Aganga

Mr. Aganga is qualified as a chartered accountant and was appointed as the Minister of Industry, Trade, and Investment of Nigeria in 2010. His professional career extends over four decades, holding several leadership positions both within the private and public sector. Mr. Aganga was previously a Managing Director with Goldman Sachs in London and was also a Director with Ernst & Young, London where he delved into venture capitalism, private equity, and hedge funds. Mr. Olusegun Aganga is the Founder of 3V Partners Ltd., an asset development and investment company focused on some identified sectors of the economy including infrastructure.

• Kumar Mangalam Birla

As we all know, Kumar Mangalam Birla is an Indian billionaire and chairman of the Aditya Birla Group. Birla took charge of his family business soon after completing his chartered accountancy degree. With his degree, Birla could steer his family business and achieve bigger profits, making the business profile increase globally.

• Tony Fernandes

Tony Fernandes is also a popular name in the chartered accountancy world. He has successfully made his name in the no-frills airline industry. Tony achieved his accountancy degree from the London School of Economics at the United Kingdom. Later, Tony became an associate member of Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA)  and founded AirAsia in 2001. He also serves as an auditor with Virgin Records and regional Vice President at Warner Music in Southeast Asia.

So Where Can You Start?

If you are ready to get started on your journey in chartered accountancy, why wait? It is time you start focusing on the skills you can gain right now, i.e., analytical and communicational skills with the 1010 Coding Excel Course. In this course, you can gain the basics and advanced-level skills of using Microsoft excel and understanding the concepts of creating professional analytical reports. As a result, it can help you build your expertise and skills in Excel and help you understand and practice the necessary analytical skills.

Additionally, once you are done improving and building your analytical skills, it is never too soon to learn more. For that, this programming course is highly beneficial to help you understand the machine language too. After all, the jobs of tomorrow don’t only require human interaction but also demand professional machine interactions and programming skills. Especially the best learning time is before the age of 18 where one has a higher learning capacity. So go ahead and make the most out of it for your future, starting from NOW!

Conclusion:

That’s all to our short guide on discovering chartered accountancy as a career. Now it’s time you make your professional decision and secure your future the right way by starting your learning journey with 1010 Coding today!