As you would have seen, last week I was a guest lecturer at Macquarie Uni. It was a great experience and I really enjoyed presenting to the students and giving them a snapshot of a day in the life of a public practice accountant in the SME space.
Whilst listening to the other guest lecturers and also while presenting myself it became apparent that the accountant of the future will not be able to focus on a single discipline and remain relevant.
As fellow presenter Eugene Macey (Senior Manager, PwC Consulting/Advisory) talked about during his presentation, ‘accountants’ need to be multi-disciplinary and amass a range of critical thinking and analytical skills. They need to be able to think outside of the box and focus on providing solutions to their clients.
The Digital Disruption was talked about by all the presenters during the lecture and all agreed that this change has meant that ‘accounting’ is more than just the numbers.
And that leads me to an article that I came across on the day of my lecture, written by Micheal ‘MC’ Carter. The timing was a little ironic but nonetheless, it confirmed exactly what I was going to talk about and given the common theme across all presentations from the day is more proof that successful accountants are adapting to change…changes driven by our client’s demands.
In reading the article, I found that the first comment on the article extremely interesting and I won’t say much about it except that this resistance to change will eventually see many of these accountants losing their clients who are demanding this type of attention to those firms that do want to show an interest in their clients overall affairs (and want to jump into ‘shark infested waters’), whether they are financial planners or not 🙂
The article is below and is a good read.
The Numers Paradox – Accounting Is Not About Numbers by Michael Carter.
James Solomons 