When the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA), a global body for professional accountants, gathered youths, prospective customers, students and its affiliate in Lagos recently, the aim was to connect them to the future and also create a strong education platform for them.
The programme which was well attended mostly by National Youth Service Corps (NYSC)members, was also aimed to expose them to how to pursue global qualification in accountancy and to empower them on how to secure better job options.
“This is all about connecting ACCA customers; over the last few years, what we did to reward excellence in terms of people that passed their exam was just to put them in the newspaper”, explained Olatunji Adeleye, ACCA’s acting Country Manager, who spoke at the programme with the theme, ‘Connecting Futures’.
Continuing, Adeleye explained, “one of the things we also want to use this event to achieve is to reward our students publicly and let them also share with other students who have been struggling in their ACCA journey that it is actually possible”.
According to him, there are lots of career opportunities in ACCA “and I think our last resort is to let every single stakeholder understand that just getting a university degree is no longer enough; we are in the era where we are building professional graduates and we build for the future”.
He disclosed that the programme, which would be extended to Port Harcourt and Abuja in the coming months, was all about providing the needed shortcut for students and also for letting them know that the association was always there to support them.
Adeleye sees a bright future for the accounting profession, but advised that people should not develop the mind-set that if they studied accounting, they would only end up becoming chartered accountants.
“We have different avenues for people to express what they have learnt and we have a lot of accountants who are chief financial officers; we have people who moved to the academia”, he noted, citing an instance of ACCA member in their office who is the head of educational development and whose job is basically to ensure that students have support to be able to take exams and pass them.
According to him, the structure of the ACCA exams ensures that members go through exams in what is called the 3Es – exams, experience and ethics. “One of the things we pride ourselves in is that we have a very high ethical standard and before you can have our membership you must have gone through that to attest to the fact that you were conferred with our ethical standards”, he assured.
“One thing I want to assure of is that the ACCA accountant, the ACCA business bankers, the ACCA qualified accountants in Nigeria are not involved in perpetrating any unethical behaviour,” he added.
CHUKA UROKO
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