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Oklahoma. He has been years.
ver the last 20 years, I’ve been a new accountant, taught accounting and trained new accountants. As I’ve
struggled and tried to help others who were struggling, I’ve given a lot of thought to what the accounting education system could do to better prepare accounting students to face what they were about to encounter. Tere are four concepts I’d like to see incorporated into accounting education that I believe would help students immensely. First, students need to be taught early and often that accounting is about learning to measure items within a framework. Once students grasp that this is the basis of accounting, learning a new framework and adapting to the basics of the new framework should seem simple. I learned this amazingly simple concept by chance shortly after I graduated from college when discussing the computerized CPA exam project with Tom Omer, now a professor at the University of Nebraska. I don’t remember his exact words, but we were discussing differences between tax law, GAAP and IFRS when Tom said, “It’s just different ways of measuring things.” No one had ever put it that simply to me and I don’t believe many accounting students have truly grasped this concept. As a result, I’ve seen many people who come out of school (some even go their entire careers) terrified of change. Tis is a shame because the ability to operate in both the GAAP and tax worlds is critical for many jobs. While I firmly believe that most everyone should have a specialty, as there is far too much GAAP, IFRS, tax law, etc. for anyone to be an expert in all of it, every student should be taught Tom’s simple philosophy. Learning new measurement frameworks is not something to be feared. And shouldn’t instructors have some responsibility to teach students not to be afraid?
8 CPAFOCUS May/June 2018
Next, students need to be taught how to operate in the real world. Far too many of the problems students encounter in accounting classes are neat and clean. While it’s true they must first learn to crawl, many students leave school never having learned to walk. For example, many accounting programs teach the basic theory of assets, liabilities, equity, etc. but fail to prepare students for the real world where things can get a bit messy (like being asked to prepare a tax return for a client whose retained earnings doesn’t balance because the client failed to post prior year adjusting entries or posted inaccurate entries to the prior year). Nor do students get much preparation for how to deal with the difficult personalities they will surely encounter. Additionally, accounting programs need to
put more emphasis on problem solving. I find that too many new accountants fresh out of school have been crammed full of facts they will never remember. What they lack, however, are basic logic and problem-solving skills. I would dearly love to see accounting programs strike a better balance between preparing students for the exam and preparing them to succeed in their chosen profession (and in life). Problem solving is highly prized. Te
problem-solving skills needed by new staff are:
1. Te ability to understand a situation well enough to identify problems and opportunities;
2. Te ability to comprehend enough about the situation that when one explains more about the situation, they understand what they are being told;
3. Te ability to understand an explanation of the final results needed and the ability to figure out how to get there; and
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