RVKS' NOTES
Preparing for the Profession the Next Five Years Will Actually Require
How RVKS thinks about training a chartered accountant
A Firm Conscious of What Comes Next
At RVKS, we have long believed that training a chartered accountant cannot be designed only around the syllabus in front of a student today. A trainee who enters the profession now will be practising three to five years from this point, in a professional environment that is already visibly different from the one the current examination was built to test. Being conscious of that gap, and preparing for it deliberately, is part of what we consider our responsibility as a training firm.
Working Knowledge and the Exam, Together
We do not see working knowledge and examination readiness as two separate tracks that a trainee moves through one after the other. The two are built together. A student needs the practical grounding to clear the examination, certainly, but the same training period is also the only real window in which to build the working knowledge the profession will demand once the examination is behind them. Treating the two as sequential wastes the very years in which both could have been built side by side.
Six Stages of Business as the Training Ground
Every business a trainee will eventually advise moves through recognisable stages, Startup, Survive, Stabilise, Scale, Succession and Sale, and each stage teaches something a listed company engagement alone cannot. Cost discipline is learned where survival is not guaranteed. Judgment is learned inside a family's unfinished conversation about succession. A training ground that shows a student only the later, more governed stages leaves much of that education incomplete, however strong its technical exposure may be.
- Startup
- Survive
- Stabilise
- Scale
- Succession
- Sale
Beyond Technical: The Four Dimensions
We think about what a trainee needs across four dimensions. The first is functional and technical knowledge, whose primary intent, honestly, is to help a student pass the examination, and which remains the necessary foundation. The second is the longer horizon, being solutions oriented, adaptable and agile enough to meet a business on its own terms rather than a textbook's. The third is communication, interpersonal skill and a capacity for perpetual learning, the qualities that let technical knowledge actually reach the person who needs it. The fourth is discipline and process thinking, the quieter habits that let sound judgment hold up under pressure. A student measured only against the first of these has seen a quarter of what the profession will eventually ask of them.
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functional and technical knowledge
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solutions oriented, adaptable and agile
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communication, interpersonal skill and a capacity for perpetual learning
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discipline and process thinking
Three Ideas That Inform This Thinking
This view did not form in isolation. Marshall Goldsmith's observation that the habits which create early success are rarely the ones that sustain it, Vijay Govindarajan's argument that managing the present, forgetting the past selectively, and building the future are disciplines to be run together rather than in sequence, and Satya Nadella's description of moving an entire culture from knowing it all to learning it all, all sit behind how we think about training someone for a profession that will not stay still.
- Marshall Goldsmith
- Vijay Govindarajan
- Satya Nadella
The Larger Challenge: Learn, Unlearn, Relearn
The biggest challenge a professional will face in the years ahead is unlikely to be the acquisition of new knowledge. It will be the willingness to set aside what once worked, and to keep doing so, more than once, over a career. We would rather a trainee left RVKS having practised that willingness already, in a training ground built wide enough to demand it, than encounter it for the first time when the stakes are considerably higher.
