Schulich Delivering the Sort of Highly Flexible, Career-Targeted Diplomas Today’s Professionals are Looking For
One of the more recent trends impacting management education is the trend toward shorter, more flexible programs with a highly specialized focus. Known as diplomas, these educational credentials are hyper-focused on career-relevant skills while still delivering academic rigour.
At Schulich, we’re looking to establish a leadership position in this newly emerging area and have developed a number of unique, career-targeted diplomas. One of the very first, launched several months ago, is our School’s new Graduate Diploma in Accounting Analytics.
The fully remote part-time diploma program lets accounting professionals acquire the latest industry expertise in accounting data analytics and visualization as well as proficiency in AI technologies without interrupting their careers.
The program taps into Schulich’s expertise in business analytics – we established one of the world’s first business degrees in the field – as well as our status as a recognized global leader in digital accounting and home of the CPA Ontario Centre in Digital Financial Information.
In this month’s column, Professor Shanker Trivedi, Director of Schulich’s Master of Accounting (MAcc) Program, provides an overview of how the new online diploma program will deliver skills upgrades to working professionals in a rapidly emerging area within the accounting profession.
It’s the first of many innovative new programs we’re developing to give professionals the kind of short, flexible and industry-relevant skills they’re hungry for.
Best,
Detlev Zwick, PhD
Dean, Tanna H. Schulich Chair in Digital Marketing Strategy
Schulich School of Business
Providing accounting professionals with the latest expertise in accounting data analytics and visualization
Schulich is Canada’s leading accounting program, with award-winning professors and top industry professionals teaching in our classrooms. We attract some of the best
students to our program and our graduates are sought after by blue-chip employers, including all major accounting firms and industry leaders, making Schulich a significant source of talent for the Canadian accounting industry. Our reputation has also been built on the strength of our renowned Schulich Accounting Case Method, which is used throughout our accounting curriculum, and which has a proven track record of preparing students for successful careers in accounting.
In my role as Director of the Master of Accounting program at Schulich, I not only aim to prepare our students for the rigorous CPA certification process, but also focus on fully preparing them for the business world of the future. This includes developing critical thinking and communication skills as well as learning how to use advanced new technologies in an accounting context.
Accounting is famously known as the language of business. Traditionally, financial and structured data have been the domain of accountants. Furthermore, accountants, specifically auditors, have been familiar with drilling into data and analyzing data for decades. However, with the advent of big data and predictive capabilities, this relatively narrow focus stands the risk of becoming irrelevant to the larger business community.
The reason why: non-financial and unstructured data are becoming increasingly critical. As a result, accountants need to be comfortable with analyzing and drawing inferences from both financial and non-financial data, as well as from structured and unstructured data. They have to think of data in all of its forms as an asset, and endeavour to create, modify, grow and derive value from it. Having the ability to automate many procedures is another skill accountants need to learn. Finally, communicating their inferences to others in easily understandable forms, including visualization, is a key skill going forward.
To achieve these objectives, we are launching a new fully online part-time Graduate Diploma in Accounting Analytics (GDAN) this coming fall. This program represents the first fully online program at Schulich, in addition to being one of a handful of pioneering programs in accounting analytics in Canada. The part-time and online nature of our program, coupled with courses scheduled during weekday evenings and on weekends, will make it especially convenient for working accounting professionals from across the globe.
Data analytics and visualization are increasingly being used in all areas of accounting, including financial and managerial accounting, auditing via the use of audit analytics, taxation, and tax administration, among others. Schulich’s GDAN program will give accountants familiarity with data analytics and visualization for accounting and financial services contexts covering descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive analytics. The GDAN program will also importantly train accountants to take advantage of the capabilities being unleashed by the continuously evolving Generative Artificial Intelligence (Generative AI), which is already impacting various facets of accounting (RSM, 2024).
Our curriculum has been developed after extensive discussion with leaders in the profession and industry. While retaining our strength in the case-based method, the GDAN program will be highly practical, adopting a consulting focus and emphasizing data governance, including data confidentiality and privacy, two domains of critical interest to accountants. Recognizing the constant change in technology, and the prevalence of different proprietary software used by different organizations, we have structured our program to be tool agnostic. Finally, our instructors include both experienced industry professionals and academic experts, enabling us to keep abreast of cutting-edge business practices and new advances in the field.
With a strong focus on providing highly relevant, in-demand skills, Schulich’s GDAN program will allow working professionals to make an immediate impact in their careers.
Shanker Trivedi
Director, Master of Accounting (MAcc) Program
Source: RSM, 2024. Generative AI: transforming Audit, Tax and Accounting in all industries. https://www.rsm.global/latinamerica/en/insights/generative-ai-transforming-audit-tax-and-accounting-all-industries