Professional Experience Requirement (PER) – ACCA

   In a recent post on Linkedin we asked from our network of students and professionals, what they would like to see being covered on THEIR platform i.e. ACCA Club India and one of the most common things that was suggested was PER.

Professional Experience Requirement (PER) is one of the key constituents of ACCA journey to Membership. On the contrary to what people think that ACCA doesn’t requirement internship, the PER is actually the same as internship or most commonly in India known as Articleship. Therefore every ACCA student needs to complete the PER to achieve the much coveted ACCA Member status. Now how do you get it???

The Professional Experience Requirement (PER) is split between two aspects, first is the Number of Years of Experience and second is the Performance Objectives. So let’s understand what we need to do to get the number of years’ experience. The requirement is that every student who aspire to get the membership needs to complete a 3 years or 36 months of relevant work experience. When we say 3 years, it is a full time role therefore if you are working as a part time, then your number of years may get longer. In terms of part time experience, there is no absolute clarity but safe to assume a full time work would entail a 40 hour shift a week. Therefore if you work 20 hours, then you’ll need to work 6 years instead of 3.

In terms of the relevant role, it is job where the period is spent on activities and tasks that are accounting, finance, audit and assurance related, or in other related technical areas such as taxation, insolvency and forensics.Therefore all the areas which are acceptable in the technical objectives areas are acceptable as the relevant role. Now what are the technical roles?

The performance objectives which consist of Essentials and Technical objectives are closely linked to the exams taken by students. This means that the knowledge that students develop over the years of studies and examinationsand subsequently help to develop relevant skills and techniques they use in the workplace. So the Essential skills are as follows

1. Ethics and professionalism
2. Stakeholder relationship management
3. Strategy and innovation
4. Governance, risk and control
5. Leadership and management

All the above as the term itself suggest are compulsory and every student has to ensure that they exhibit these over the period of 3 years. For e.g. Stakeholder relationship management should be exhibited through experience of working with suppliers, other departments like HR, or external parties like customers, clients etc. If in your work experience you’re able to do that then you can record this as to be achieved. Like that, all the essentials need to be recorded over the period of 36 months.

In regards to the Technical objectives, the requirement is to meet 4 objectives from the given list of 17 objectives. The categories are as follows:

• Corporate and business reporting
  • Record and process transactions and events
  • Prepare external financial reports
  • Analyse and interpret financial reports
• Financial management
  • Evaluate investment and financing decisions
  • Manage and control working capital
  • Identify and manage financial risk
• Management accounting
  • Evaluate management accounting systems
  • Plan and control performance
  • Monitor performance
• Taxation
  • Tax computations and assessments
  • Tax compliance and verification
  • Tax planning and advice

 

• Audit and assurance
  • Prepare for and plan the audit and assurance process
  • Collect and evaluate evidence for an audit or assurance engagement
  • Review and report on the findings of an audit or assurance engagement
• Advisory and consultancy
  • Business advisory
• Data, digital and technology
  • Data analysis and decision support

 

So what you need to do is to ensure over the period 3 years you need to ensure that you get the experience of 4 from the above 17 objectives. For e.g. if you are in Audits, you can quite easily achieve the 3 objectives and then look for another category to achieve your 4 technical objective, this could be management accounting or financial accounting. So the ACCA gives you FULL flexibility of what career you want to achieve, it doesn’t have to be audits only. If it doesn’t interest you, go straight into the field that does!

So the above was an indepth coverage of what PER is all about. In our Part 2 of PER, we will cover how to record the PER and what are the things that needs to be covered in your statement when you get the PER signed off. Till then happy reading!