Cpe Courses: Planned, Personalized, And Optimized

By Author: JohnReiling
Total Articles: 16
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CPAs are the ultimate knowledge workers, so it only stands to reason that CPA CPE is required. In the accounting profession, so much knowledge is required, 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 CPA CPE: 1. 'technical skills' in one's specialty, 2. 'hard skills' in adjacent or objective business domains, and 3. 'soft skills' to develop greater personal savvy. Here's a more detailed look at each.

CPE Courses for Technical Skills
By technical skills, I mean skill domains in and around the CPA's specialty. Some of these skills are of a broadening type within the

accounting knowledge domain, such as capital budget accounting, or general operating budgeting. But more often than not, they involve expertise in accounting rules, usually involving changing legislation as well as best practices, in certain specialties. For example, one accounting practitioner may want to deepen and maintain up-to-date knowledge about inheritance taxation. Another may need to ...
... keep abreast of unique accounting complexities in, for example, the construction industry. Still another may be providing service related to international business and require broader knowledge of how to handle transactions between countries.

CPE Courses for Objective Hard Skills
Separate and distinct from the technical skills 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 make a CPA more effective and potentially enable and support new business objectives.

CPE Courses for Soft Skills
Soft skills are critically important, and working with clients, within a small or large business, or in the public domain demands robust 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 finding the right CPA CPE Courses
A CPA has about 40 hours to work with each year for fulfilling the requirements. Ideally, this will be accomplished by some sort of combination of technical training related to the specialty, hard skill development to broaden skills in targeted areas, and soft skill development to round out the skill set. The good news is that there are plenty of training opportunities available to achieve all of these objectives and earn CPE simultaneously.

One More Thing
The 'multiple sources' strategy is something that brings great advantages to those that use it. A 'multiple sources' strategy refers to the idea of learning a subject from multiple angles - which can be achieved by studying the material from multiple sources. Each of these sources will offers a different perspective on the subject, enabling the learner to more clearly understand the subject. While many materials - including the online training that we provide - try to embed the 'multiple sources' approach, it is up to the individual to decide how they will approach this.

John Reiling provides hundreds of NASBA-approved CPE for CPA Continuing Education online training courses on the site CPEtrainingonline.com. John has earned multiple licenses and certifications - licensed Professional Engineer (PE), several IT certifications, and current Project Management Professional (PMP) and Six Sigma Green Belt (SSGB). He provides additional professional online training under http://protrainingonline.com/