PwC promotes ACCA membership

Czechmanagers able to find the time and financial resources to invest in their personal development got a new opportunity to enrich their skills at the end of last month.
               
On Feb. 26, international consultancy PwC (PwC) in Prague launched a series of training sessions to obtain fullmembership with the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA). That is an internationally recognized certificate in the field of financialmanagement, management and accounting. In the Czech Republic, PwC is the second institution offering such training, together with training consultancy BPP Professional Education and the Prague College, which specialize in providing distance ACCA learning.
               
Membership applications for the ACCA are managed by a professional body, the ACCA Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary. They include 14 exams, three of them priced at €50 (Kč 1,475), six at €60 and five at €70. There is also a yearlymembership fee of €66. Exams take place twice a year, in June and December, in Prague and Brno, South Moravia.
               
“It takes three years on average to qualify because the candidatemust have at least three years of professional experience. However, a candidate can take a period of up to 10 years to file all exams,” said Katka Benešová, head of ACCA Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.
               
The exam fees don’t include training or study materials; CBW found out that if a manager gets ready to obtain the ACCA qualification, he or she should be ready to pay the average costs of a master in business administration (MBA) degree or above Kč 300,000 according to the selected form of training-direct or distance learning.
               
PwC is offering the training session in the framework of the Business Academy, a specialized training environment provided by PwC in the Czech Republic. Joe Appleton, the head of the PwC Business Academy, said that PwC students had a 74 percent of success rate in December 2008. This is above the Czech average of 53 percent. The PwC academy was set up in the summer of 2008; last autumn, it already rounded up the first series of training mainly aimed at obtaining certification for the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).