ITB December 2024/January 2025 - Magazine - Page 25
“By integrating sustainability, technology and specialised
accounting practices into our accounting curriculum and
assessments, educators can ensure students are wellprepared to excel in emerging roles and industries.”
Jeanette Ng FCPA, Singapore Institute of Technology
“Green finance specialists and impact investment
analysts will support the funding and management
of sustainable projects, while climate risk managers
will assess and mitigate the financial risks associated
with climate change. Expertise in ethics and
compliance will also become increasingly essential
to navigate more complex regulatory landscapes.”
SKILLS FOR TOMORROW
Experts are adamant that the terminology around
“soft skills” must change. After all, there is nothing
soft about skills such as communication, teamwork,
critical thinking, problem-solving, collaboration and
emotional intelligence.
“Critical thinking and problem-solving skills
are key, and these are skill sets that still require
human judgement and thought processing,” says
Jeanette Ng FCPA, associate professor, business,
communication and design at Singapore Institute
of Technology.
Ng believes programming and coding skills will
become “a norm” for accounting undergraduates,
despite a long-held resistance among many students
to sign up for computer science courses. “Educators
have to find new ways to teach programming
and coding skills to make it palatable to this group,”
Ng says.
As businesses focus on renewable energy,
climate risk, the circular economy, sustainability
reporting and green finance, Ng expects
sustainability roles to become more entrenched.
Such trends will put pressure on educational
institutions to upskill students.
“Accounting and finance education must evolve
quickly to meet the demands of a net-zero economy
and an increasingly complex financial landscape,”
Ng says. “By integrating sustainability, technology
and specialised accounting practices into our
accounting curriculum and assessments, educators
can ensure students are well-prepared to excel
in emerging roles and industries.”
Over the next decade, Edelstein sees the roles
and skill sets of accountants evolving in three critical
ways. First, they will be required to manage global
teams and the flexibility requirements of team
members due to the increasing use of offshoring,
remote working and flexible work practices.
“There will be a much bigger focus on people
and management skills that enable someone to
create a cohesive work environment,” Edelstein says.
Second, accountants will have to be “tech-savvy
to the point where the best employees should
automate themselves out of a job and then proceed
to another project with higher value-add work”.
Third, the focus will shift to utilising internal and
external data to “add value to the company’s future
decision-making, strategy and direction”.
Yulius Santoso, finance and accounting recruiter,
and founder of HR and talent agency Lucky You
Found Me, agrees that the offshoring trend will
continue at pace in the next decade as accounting
and finance companies seek to build in workflow
and cost efficiencies while outsourcing highly
repetitive, low-value activities. Likely target countries
for such work will include the Philippines, India,
Malaysia, Vietnam and Sri Lanka.
While offshoring may free up accountants
to do more interesting value-add work, Santoso says
it comes with risks. With “repetitive skills” being
outsourced, how will firms train the next generation
of accountants in some of the fundamentals and
equip new graduates with basic skills?
“If you have a graduate coming out of university
and they are not exposed to this type of work,
the fundamentals can be lacking. We’re seeing this
already because of the widespread use of software
such as Xero,” Santoso says.
AI: FRIEND OR FOE?
Toby Walsh, scientia professor of artificial intelligence
at University of New South Wales describes AI as
the “greatest gold rush in human history”. He notes
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