Universities don’t instill technical proficiency
Following a discussion with one of my former professors regarding an article from the Pennsylvania CPA Journal I was given an opportunity to speak to a group of students at Creighton University regarding certain Excel skills that I have ascertained and use on a daily basis to be effective in performing my work. I know that the local universities do not require much in the way of developing technical proficiency with key tools because of my recent experience as a student and experience with new staff from various local schools that are astounded by some rather simple but effective formulas that make our work much quicker and easier.
My rule is basically to never do by hand what you can get the computer to do for you. Use Excel as a spreadsheet, not as a calculator or worse, a typewriter. Use Excel to perform valuable functions that speed up your work, instead of merely digitizing work that was previously done on paper. I remember during my first month at work, someone on the other side of the cubical wall asked if anyone knew how to use a VLOOKUP function in Excel, and the local area of the office was silent. Then there was a mention that a very technically inclined person from the other side of the office my know how to use the function properly. I could not believe that no one who had been at the firm for several years knew how to use this function. At the time, I was not familiar with it myself, but I have since become very familiar with the family of lookup functions.
Another great decision making / problem solving skill that would be great to have out of the university is to quickly recognize a situation where a database program is going to be more effective than a spreadsheet. I have done a ton of trial balances for tax clients in Excel, because that is the way it has been done for the past 20 years. However, with the integration of improved trial balance software (CaseWare), I am starting to wonder if anyone’s trial balance should see the inside of a spreadsheet, no matter how simple (especially if there will be a lot of book-keeping adjustments made). The trial balance software reduces errors and duplication of work from year to year by giving accounts permanent associations that generate useful reports automatically.
Not that universities don’t do a great job at giving us the proper foundation to be adequate accountants, but firms as well as other employers expect someone who has graduated from an accounting program to have a certain level of proficiency with these types of tools that is not necessarily instilled in our post-secondary educational system. I was thrilled that this professor understood the issue and allowed me to speak to his class, but I would like to see the next step of required curriculum or testing to establish a baseline for technical proficiency that employers can depend upon.
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April 21st, 2008 at 1:39 pm
I’m currently a senior accounting major at UNL and absolutely loved your post. I’m a slight tech nerd and converted from a computer science major to accounting in the middle of my junior year. Since, I’ve been continually amazed with the lack of Excel knowledge of many of my classmates. Granted, I’ve basically taught myself what I know up to this point so I’m ahead of most, but the only course offered for accounting students that integrates any software instruction whatsoever is Accounting Information Systems (ACCT309). We get about 3-5 basic tutorials of Excel and the same in Access, and those are mediocre at best.
The largest competitive advantage I’ve had in every office job I’ve worked thus far in my life has stemmed from my computer skills. Every firm/company seems to retrain their employees to their own strategies, business plans, and processes. The one constant requirement that doesn’t change is being able to utilize Excel, Access, and even Word to do work efficiently. The use of these applications varies little across organizations, and yet they are what we learn least about in school. It’s highly disappointing in my mind, especially in a professional that makes a living out of manipulating large amounts of data and formulas.
May 21st, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Like you, I find it astonishing just how little emphasis and technical training is given from the university in using some basic tools, rather than theories, to solve real problems. We used Excel daily in stats class, but the data applications there were of a much higher level and for a different purpose than what an accountant uses.
It seems to me that more universities would at least be requiring testing to establish a baseline expectation for employers to rely upon. Some people are good at picking this up on the job, but others will defer to someone else throughout their whole career or worse yet, do things the slow and hard way. I guess it’s good that most accountants bill by the hour, but it seems you could make better use of those hours with better use of tools.
November 17th, 2008 at 12:36 am
How could we verify the effectiveness of such a possibility?
November 17th, 2008 at 7:35 am
If you are referring to the effectiveness of a required training/class program, I think you verify the effectiveness with before and after testing of core areas. The before testing would give a baseline and a measurement of need and also provide a benchmark against which progress can be measured.