Cpe Online: Planning And Personalizing Choices

CPAs are almost the very definition of knowledge workers, so it only stands to reason that CPA CPE is required. In the accounting profession, there is so much to know, and the nature of an individual's choices depends on the specialty, goals, and aspirations of each professional accountant. For planning purposes, there are three categories of skills for CPE Online: 1. 'technical skills' in one's specialty, 2. 'hard skills' in targeted business skill areas, and 3. 'soft skills' to support the people side of being a CPA. Here's a more in depth look at these three skill areas.

Technical Skills for CPE Online
By technical skills, I am referring to skills in and around the CPA's specialty. Some of these skills are broad in nature within the

accounting field, such as capital budget accounting, or budgeting in general. But more often than not, they involve accounting rule expertise, usually involving changing legislation as well as best practices, in certain specialties. For example, one accounting practitioner may want to expand knowledge about inheritance taxation. Another may need to keep abreast of accounting rules and unique business structures in, for example, the oil industry. Still another may be entrenched in international business and need in depth knowledge about accounting for cross-border transactions.

CPE Online for Objective Hard Skills
Critical to success are hard skills in areas like software, such as MS Office, accounting software, or even enterprise management software. Other hard skills include business skills such as project management, portfolio management, business analysis, Six Sigma, and much more. These skills are get beyond the domain of accounting, but can greatly increase the effectiveness of a CPA and fuel new business objectives.

CPE Online for Soft Skills
Soft skills are critically important, and working with clients, within a large or small business, or in the public domain demands fine-tuned soft skills. Indeed, it is well-documented that a large - maybe even vast majority - proportion of success is determined by soft skills. These skills include leadership, communications, team building, and technical writing and speaking in public.

Personalizing an Approach to earning CPA CPE
A CPA has about 40 hours of CPE opportunity each year for fulfilling the requirements. Ideally, this will be accomplished by some sort of combination of technical CPE to support the specialty, targeted hard skill development, and soft skill development to round out the skill set. The good news is that there are plenty of training opportunities available to reach any and all of these professional objectives and satisfy CPE requirements at the same time.

One Last Item
The 'multiple sources' strategy is an approach that generously rewards those that use it. A 'multiple sources' strategy describes the strategy of learning a subject from several vantage points - which is realized by absorbing the material from several distinct sources. Each of these sources will offers a different perspective on the subject, enabling the learner to deepen understanding of the subject. While many learning modes - including the online training that we provide - try to embed the 'multiple sources' approach, in the end the individual learner needs to decide their optimal approach.