Credit where credits due, and I'm very impressed that CIMA is moving away from everything being electronic and has moved back to producing actual welcome packs for new students.

Conversely now you don't even get printed attendance dockets supplied by ACCA who again this year put up exam fees considerably ahead of inflation only to see exam dockets and results notification go the same way as the student accountant magazine.

Now, don't know about anyone else but magazines such as student accountant and PQ magazines used to be toilet reading material and there's no way that I'm installing a PC with internet access in the toilet so basically I've not read it since it went electronic (PQ and NQ magazines are much better reads anyway).

I appreciate the need to reduce te amount of stuff that we print otherwise where will Ikea get all of their packaging materials from for us to simply throw away but whilst I still receive endless printed sales drivell through the door that I would never read the stuff that I would, indeed need to, read and store for reference all seems to have gone online.

So, back to the original point, a big well done CIMA for taking a bold step in the opposit direction to the other bodies in giving your students what they want and need rather than giving them the cheapest option simply to reduce costs.

Right Saturday morning rant over. Now where's my damn coffee....

YLB-HO wrote:

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 if we don't introduce it online we are going to be left behind and be seen as outdated

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Hi Frauke,

I remember being in a meeting where outsourcing development work to India was being discussed and we got exactly the same line.

All of the other banks are doing it so we don't want to be left behind!

I did suggest that if 99 turkeys vote for Christmas does that put the 100th turkey in the wrong if he votes against it.

My arguement was lost on them

Actually I can see CIMA winning a lot of brownie points with potential members by giving people what they want rather than telling them that what they think that they want is actually incorrect.

As an aside, just been reading the article in PQ and apparently this move by CIMA was as a result of taking the decision out of the hands of marketing and putting the IT manager in charge of it.

I think that the banks would be in a lot better state if they had adopted a similar approach as my experience has always been that senior managers listen to management consultancies as though their words are a higher truth where IT managers tend to have a somewhat more skeptical and grounded outlook.

I know what you are saying about some liking online and some liking print.

The idea of books seems to be alien to my boy who wants to find the answer immediately using a search facility and misses completely all the information that he doesn't read because of the ease of finding what he thinks that he needs. (not going to go into the debarcle of his essay on the black death where he took from wikipedia that it was spread by beavers!!!).

He doesn't want to read books but rather wants instantaneous answers using search facilities without reading around a subject.

Due to the way that he's been taught by school to learn he will end up as one of those who wants everything online.

Maybe the move online is preparing for the next generation where their learning experience is very different to previous generations which did not have the options.

I can completely see the legitimacy of the media espechially as it makes tax queries so much easier to track an answer to but as suggested in my first message, I think that the bodies publishing the information should very much take into account the purpose of the document rather than simply adopting a one approach fits all which is the way that they seem to have been going.

Is it catch 22? Maybe. Or maybe we should refer to the way professional bodies (and banks, and insurance companies, etc) follow each other as Lemming Syndrome.