Critical Competencies for CPAs
Source: CPA Success
The following includes excerpts, reproduced with permission, from a blog entry by Tom Hood.
Our research from the CPA Horizons 2025 Project identified five critical competencies for the future (after the core technical skills):
- Leadership: The ability to develop and share insights, and the aptitude to mobilize and inspire others to action.
- Communications: The ability to give and exchange information with meaningful context, and appropriate delivery and interpersonal skills.
- Strategic thinking: A future-minded and flexible mindset that thinks critically and creatively.
- Collaboration and synthesis: Being effective at engaging others and working across boundaries to turn challenges into opportunities.
- Being tech-savvy: Anticipating technology changes and how they can benefit others.
We put these skills in a framework we call The Bounce and show how the skills work across a career ladder and emphasize the importance of the key financial technical skills early in a CPA's career. Interestingly, this follows Malcolm Gladwell's “10,000-Hour Rule” from his book Outliers, in which he claims the key to success in any field requires about 10,000 hours to master a body of knowledge.
Applying this to The Bounce would show the first five years of a CPA career really working to master the critical accounting and financial body of knowledge. Then, at the manager position comes the turn and change of focus. It is this point at which the new skills like those listed above become critical.
The entry contains a short video that explains the concept.
For the complete blog entry, read “The Top 5 Skills CPAs Need Now.”
From CPA Success, the blog of the Maryland Association of CPAs, March 7, 2013, http://www.cpasuccess.com.