Charting the future with management accounting

There is a growing problem in education where students are not being equipped to meet employers' expectations, leading to severe cases of unemployment amongst young adults worldwide. The accounting industry is no different, and the need for graduates who are able to sustain their relevancy to market demands has become increasingly pertinent as progress in technology has come to demand more of this established profession.

Against this backdrop, the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (CIMA) has taken a new strategic direction with regard to its syllabus to address this challenge. The focus on business relevance is not a new approach for CIMA — it has been a feature of its ethos since its formation in 1919 — and the founders of CIMA understood, even then, that accounting methods in business needed to be professionalised in order to solve the pressing corporate issues of the day.

Big and small, public and private, all must compete within an increasingly globalised world. The profound influx of data presents an element of risk as the pertinent information often gets lost amidst the white noise. Recent high-profile failures of once-powerful corporations such as Blackberry, HMV, and Kodak, demonstrate the dangers of drawing the wrong conclusions from the data at hand.