Strand84 wrote:

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After some advice

I have recently seen a vacancy with a FTSE 100 company that are advertising a finance 3 year training course / role. I meet the qualifying criteria for the role (300 UCAS points) and they offer full sponsorship for AAT and ACCA (advert states: support with study towards your AAT qualification and then ACCA qualification to be a Chartered Certified Accountant.)

There will be a lot of competition for this role but good luck with your application.

I'm currently studying with the Open University and plan to complete an open degree in Oct 2017. I have just completed module B190, am currently studying B291 (which I believe gets some AAT L2 exemptions) and am enrolled on B292 to start in Oct.

Gaining the OU certificate in accounting you could argue that you could skip AAT completely and go straight to ACCA. If you take the exemptions from the fundamentals papers that the OU certificate grants you, you may have difficulty from F4 onwards as you will not be used to the way that ACCA angles questions.

I'm really interested in the role and feel that it could be an amazing opportunity but am not sure if I will be over-committing myself trying to complete both the degree and the AAT / ACCA quals.....My degree study would finish about 6-8 months before the completion of the 3 year training programme.

The OU qualification is standalone as well as counting towards a degree. Before doing ACCA I did the forrunner to the one that your doing (B680) which was a good high level introuction to accounting.

A better route to a degree may be to do the Oxford Brookes module once you hit ACCA paper F9 and you get a BSc thrown in with the ACCA qualification. (And later you have the option to acquire an MSc (although you may need to trade in a kidney to pay for it)).

If you have not already paid for B292 then if this opportunity becomes real you may find it better to dump the OU, see if you can skip AAT and go straight to ACCA. Assuming no exemptons are claimed taking 3-4 papers per year your probably looking at 2018 to gain a degree and 2020-21 to finish the ACCA qualification (the final two papers can be a nightmare).

Any advice or guidance from those of you with experience of AAT study demands would be greatly appreciated.

I can't comment on AAT but when you move to ACCA it will take over your entire life for the duration of the qualification. You will start living your life around exam dates and lose all sense of a life beyond study.

Nikki

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kind regards,

Shaun.

 

Thank you both for your advice.

My thought process behind doing the degree as well is that some of the positions I've been seeing specify a degree at 2:1 as well as the AAT qualifications and being as I'm halfway through the degree anyway, I really wanted to complete it.

I think they are looking for younger candidates as the job is advertised as 'Finance A-Level' so I think they are looking for people that have just finished secondary education so I'm not sure if that is going to go against me or not anyway (I'm 30 and have just come back around to the world of study!)

With regards to your comment Shaun, I believe the Professional Certificate in Accounting (B291 and B292) gains me exemptions for AAT L2 and then some in L3 but being new to the whole Bookkeeping world, I could well be wrong and I don't know where AAT and ACCA start to cross over. I guess what I need to do is talk to them at interview (if I get that far), and find out what their study progression plan is and then factor in how the OU study would filter into that. I know with the AAT quals you can study at your own pace so if I can manage this study within the working hours then I could possibly continue with the OU study outside of work. Does ACCA work in the same way or is it much more structured with definitive deadlines?

I guess a big portion depends on the company and how much independant study they are expecting and pace of completion will dictate whether I can balance both........

I'm getting from both of your above posts that you are both more in favour of the AAT / ACCA than the degree if it came down to a choice?

Thanks again,

Nikki

Hi Nikki,

I believe that B291 and B292 will gain you exemption from ACCA papers F1, F2 and F3

Pretty sure that AAT Level IV gives the same exemptions as having B291/2.

ACCA have just changed their rules. The ten year rule has gone (if you didn't pass all 14 papers in ten years then you had to start again) and has been replaced with no limit on papers F1 to F9 but once F9 is passed you have seven years to pass the final five.

You can sit up to four papers at any sitting and no more than eight different papers in a year even though they have now moved away from two sittings a year (June and December). The above said I think that passing four papers in a year is a major achievement.

The papers can be attempted in any order within bands. i.e. you must pass F1 to F9 before starting on P1 to P3 and you must have passed those before doing any 2 from P4 to P7.

Generally with a company, study will take the form of the expectation that you will do the bulk of the work in your own time except for release days (maybe one or two a month, sometimes the lectures are on Saturdays but with many accountancy firms thats a normal work day anyway) to attend lectures and generally the week before the exams and the exam week are given as additional holiday.

Many companies still adopt the approach of paying for everything but if you fail one exam you are on a warning and the second fail you are out of the company. If you think thats bad with some of the big four it used to be automatic dismisal for one fail!

Smaller companies tend to be more lenient but still expect staff to make good progress within a reasonable time whilst also making a positive contribution towards the business (so a good 32+ chargable hours per week).

I don't think that you picked up on the fact that ACCA comes with a degree (if you want one) which would make the OU degree supurflous to your requirements. You will find quite a few ACCA people have Oxford Brookes degree's.

If it helps at all I did B680 and F1 to F3 (at the time 1.1 to 1.3) as I was tired of chartered freinds taking the proverbial out of me for it not being a proper Univesity. I proved them wrong in that the OU studies (plus the BPP study texts) got me through the first three ACCA papers.

As an aside there quite a few of us who did the OU course signed up with ACCA. I was the only one who did not take the offered exemptions (because I was attempting to prove a point) and after a year I was the only one left as by taking the exemptions the others missed out on getting used to the ACCA way of asking questions where often there is as much written between the lines as on the paper.

Worth emphasising that no matter what pace ACCA and AAT allow you to study at your employer will expect constant positive results and the pressure would be on to get through the qualifications as quickly as possible with no (or very few) failures. The employers support will come at the cost of all of your time inside and outside work hours.

The final advice though is that the result is worth the effort.

Kindest regards,

Shaun.

Lol!

Thanks guys, you've both helped me to put things into perspective and thanks for all the info on how the exams work - I have a much clearer idea of how some of it works now!!
Sounds like it can be really harsh and you've both made me realise that it will definately not be feasible to do both!!!!!

Shaun - I did pick up on the ability to obtain the BSc along with the ACCA - it just didn't compute that it would make the one I'm studying now moot! And thanks for the heads up about accepting the exemptions.... definately something to think about for the future either which way this works out.

I've put in the application now so I guess I'll see what happens!!!

Thanks again