The Faculty of Accountancy and Management (FAM) organised two talks on 27 June 2018 at Sungai Long Campus. Present at the event were FAM Dean Dr Sia Bee Chuan, Deputy Dean for Student Development and Industrial Training Assoc Prof David Ng Ching Yat, Head of Accountancy Department K. Shamini, lecturers and students. Invited to give the talks were External Examiner (EE) Prof Brendan O’Connell from RMIT University, Melbourne and Industrial Advisor (IA) Yap Yong Hoon.
Yap’s talk focussed on the market trend for accountants in 2018 and beyond. He spoke about his background and experience, market trend, risk related courses, areas of focus and the sample dashboard. He also highlighted the six key concerns of today’s finance leaders, which were adopting to the new technologies, adapting to the economic environment, accommodating skills and knowledge gaps in teams, managing risks, company culture and business partnering with other functions.
Yap also briefed the students about the areas to consider for future careers such as cyber security risk, credit risk, operation risk and data risk. He added, “Develop passion for the job you want. There is a need to upskill yourself, to pick up technology-related skills and embrace the technology and changes across the world to remain relevant in the society. There are certain areas you could focus such as data warehouse, artificial intelligence, data analytics, data governance, record management, cloud technology and process automation.”
Yap (left) and Prof Brendan delivering their talk
Prof Brendan, who is an external examiner for the UTAR’s accounting programme, presented a study titled “Shaping the future of accounting in business education in Australia” to the students. The study was funded by CPA Australia under its Global Research Perspectives Program. In his presentation, he spoke about the backgrounds and aims of the study, which was to access the current state of play in accounting and business education in Australia, to focus on the key challenges, issues and opportunities faced by the accounting education sector and develop feasible, innovative and productive ways to meet the many challenges faced by accounting education. Aside from that, he also spoke about the study method, key findings and recommendations to improve the discussion.
“You are studying to be a future business leader. Hence, you need to start preparing for the corporate world and train yourself to communicate with influence. A professional has good technical competence and real drive to be ethical and to acquire some of the key competencies and skills such as financial literacy, conceptual foundations of accounting and technical knowledge, cross-disciplinary knowledge and interpersonal skills,” said Prof Brendan.
The session ended with a Q&A session.
Assoc Prof Ng presenting a token of appreciation to Yap (right)
Prof Brendan receiving the token of appreciation from Dr Sia (right)
Second from left: Prof Brendan and Yap with the organising committee and lecturers
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