BUILDING COMPETENCIES FOR DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Accountants in Business (PAIB) Framework which provides an overview on the five key DNAs of a Professional Accountant in Business (PAIB). Upon completion of the programme, participants will not only be awarded the ISCA Professional Certificate in Business Accounting, but they will also be able to gain professional recognition by becoming an ISCA Professional Business Accountant (subject to meeting membership eligibility requirements).

The ISCA PBA Programme is run on an e-learning platform which allows busy accountancy and finance professionals the ease and flexibility of attaining new skill sets at their own pace. At the same time, businesses can build capabilities of their finance team by ensuring that they are equipped with emerging skill sets and knowledge to handle dynamic business situations.

Organisations will need to continue to acquire, develop and retain talents to keep up with the new skills required to drive the future. Constant learning is key to build a more agile team and having a future-ready workforce will help businesses safely navigate the uncertainties in a rapidly changing business environment. While talent acquisition remains crucial for businesses to succeed in today’s complex environment, talent development and retention are other factors that impact the disruption to businesses. The HR team plays a pivotal role in ensuring that the workforce is ready to embrace and harness the benefits of digital transformation. T o ensure that the accountancy and finance workforce is equipped with relevant skill sets for the future economy, the Institute of Singapore Chartered Accountants (ISCA) has launched the ISCA Professional Business Accountant (PBA) Programme to enhance the competencies of accountancy and finance professionals amid the digital transformation.

The ISCA PBA Programme will cover topics in the areas of Future Finance, Business Acumen, Professional Values and Ethics, Technical Excellence, and Leadership and Personal Empowerment. This is aligned to the ISCA Professional THE INSTITUTE OF SINGAPORE CHARTERED ACCOUNTANTS (ISCA) is the national accountancy body of Singapore. ISCA’s vision is to be a globally recognised professional accountancy body, bringing value to the members, the profession and wider community. There are over 32,000 ISCA members making their stride in businesses across industries in Singapore and around the world. ISCA is a member of Chartered Accountants Worldwide (CAW), a global family that brings together the members of leading institutes to create a community of over 1.8 million Chartered Accountants and students in more than 190 countries. ABOUT ISCA

Aligned to the ISCA PAIB Framework which provides an overview of the five key DNAs of a Professional Accountant in Business (PAIB), the ISCA PBA Programme aims to enhance the competencies of accountancy and finance professionals in the key areas identified in the framework.

Topics covered within the progamme:

• Self Leadership • Team Leadership

05 LEADERSHIP &

PERSONAL EMPOWERMENT

04 TECHNICAL EXCELLENCE

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam no DNAs OF

PAIBs 01 FUTURE FINANCE

• Business Analytics • Financial Modelling • Corporate Governance • Corporate Finance • Taxation • Business Valuation

PROFESSIONAL VALUES & ETHICS 03 PROFESSIONAL

VALUES &

ETHICS

• Sceptical Mindset for Accountants • Ethics • AI/Automation • Blockchain • Cybersecurity • Big Data

02 BUSINESS ACUMEN

• Business Partnering • Strategic Business

Planning & Analysis • Sustainability Reporting

GET IN TOUCH

Find out how the ISCA Professional Business Accountant (PBA) Programme can help enhance your competencies. Scan the QR code to register your interest today!

Hear What Employers Say...

As a Finance leader, I rmly believe that members of the accounting and nance team need to embrace continous learning to stay abreast of the constantly changing workplace. Besides on-the-job coaching, undertaking relevant courses will empower accountancy professionals to handle dynamic business situations. The PBA programme is based on multiple e-learning modules that oers exibility and encourages participants to learn while managing work and personal commitments.

Ms. Lelaina Lim Group Chief Financial Ocer Eu Yan Sang International Ltd

Sweeping disruption of the accounting industry is imminent. Technological change and shifting business trends demand a new approach to how the industry creates value. Increasingly, nancial controllers and CFOs will use data (structured and unstructured), robotics and predictive analytics to access nancial trends and industry information to make insightful forecasts and analysis. The ISCA PBA programme is designed to enhance the competencies of accountancy professionals by equipping them with emerging skills to do more interesting and rewarding work that will add more value to the bottom line.

Mr. Neo Sing Hwee Managing Director Head, Operations System & Control Mapletree Investments Pte Ltd

TWO CENTS The day home became the workplace

BY SHAWN

LIEW

The COVID-19 outbreak has created a wave of remote working around the world – will this herald a permanent shift in how we work?

It is 8.30am in the central business district of Singapore, and an almost surreal quiet has replaced the hustle and bustle of a typical day in Singapore’s financial hub.

Of course, this is not a typical day, and nor will it be for some time to come. As the COVID-19 outbreak continues to sweep worryingly around the world, Singapore has become just the latest country in the world to introduce a partial lockdown. From April 7 to May 4 at least, all work premises providing non-essential services in Singapore will be mandated to shut down. The majority of employees therefore, will be working from home.

Remote working, of course, is not a new concept. What is new, however, is the sheer number of companies implementing remote working today. A recent survey by Gartner found that 88% of organisations have encouraged or required employees to work from home. This eye-catching statistic, however, needs to be taken into context – for many organisations, such a move is borne out of necessity and in response to COVID-19.

The great hope, of course, is that COVID-19 can be contained as soon as possible, bringing a much-welcomed level of normalcy back to the world. How much the world would have changed by then, is subject to speculation and interpretation. In the workplace, will new shifts in working patterns emerge during COVID-19, and become entrenched post COVID-19?

For the organisations who participated in the Gartner survey, perhaps they should all be asked this question: Do you intend to maintain work-from-home policies after COVID-19 is over? Could organisations come to contemplate that the future of remote working has not only arrived, but is here to stay?

If COVID-19 has taught the workforce anything, it is certainly that technology will not be the impediment to remote working. As more and more employees work from home, communication and collaboration platforms such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Slack all reported exponential growth in the number of users. Working from home does not equate to complete isolation from fellow co-workers and business partners, and there are an overwhelming number of tools available today for telecommuting and virtual meetings.

And while we will continue to treat artificial intelligence (AI) and other intelligent tools with a sense of trepidation – whether because we have watched one too many sci-fi films about machines

rising to usurp the human race, or the more pragmatic fear of losing jobs to AI and its brethren – there is little doubt that intelligent tools, as they continue to be defined by humans, will allow remote working teams to better manage their time and resources. This could be via AI-powered productivity applications and time management systems, or incident reporting systems that help to identify problems before they are reported.

Suggestions that the Internet will collapse under the weight of usage if remote working becomes the new normal are exaggerated, to say the very least. While it is true that not all countries’ broadband networks are as advanced as say, Singapore’s, you would have to be assuming that the majority of the remote workforce are streaming Netflix and playing online video games when they are supposed to be at work. After all, these activities, which the UK’s Internet Service Providers’ Association termed as “evening peak activity”, outweighed the typical daytime demand for broadband connectivity, by 10 times.

The key to whether remote working can succeed therefore, is likely to lie with the human factor. Consider the example of IBM, which was offering the option of remote working as early as the 1980s. By 2009, the company reported that 40% of its global workforce of 386,000, were working remotely. Then, came the big turnaround in March 2017, when IBM recalled many of its workers back to the workplace.

Detractors of remote working will argue that the lack of physical presence stymies collaboration and creativity. The study of behavioural patterns will tell you that socialising is a basic biological human need that cannot be adequately replaced by nonphysical interaction. While these arguments may not necessarily be erroneous, particularly in many Asian cultures, more and more studies are beginning to dispel myths such as remote workforces lacking focus or motivation.

Moreover, organisations need to recognise and understand the growing influx of Gen Z into the workforce. For these workers born into a digital era, the concept of remote working may not only be appealing but is also viewed, as a key criteria to achieve job satisfaction. And there is nothing to suggest that they cannot excel as part of a growing remote workforce. For them, and an increasing number of the older generation, the future of remote work is indeed, now.

� 1 5 Marketing Institute of Singapore

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