5 Interesting CPD Topics for Accountants

CPD or Continuous Professional Development is a vital part of being an accountant. It ensures that your knowledge and skills are updated annually and is particularly important for key areas that require technical updates or refreshing.

When planning your CPD, you must consider the following:

• How to keep your technical skills up to date
• Stay informed of current topics allowing you to deal with related problems in an efficient way
• Ongoing personal development to help build your knowledge to be a leader of the future
• Improve management skills to deal with various issues confidently and comfortably

A consideration not often mentioned is that CPD can be engaging and represent keeping your qualification and using it as a tool to prepare for your next career step. To help provide some guidance, we’ve identified 5 courses that achieve both goals.

1. Understanding Cryptocurrency – Technical Knowledge

This CPD course is designed to give you a foundation in Blockchain and its application as the basis of cryptocurrency. Blockchain technology enables distributed public ledgers that hold immutable data in a secure and encrypted way and ensures that transactions can never be altered. While Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are the most famous examples of blockchain usage, this Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) finds a broad range of uses. Data storage, financial transactions, real estate, and asset management are just a few examples, while others are being explored.

2. Motivational Leadership – Personal Development

This course is designed to develop your leadership skills to help motivate those around you. Whether you’ve been promoted to management recently or have been at it for 10 years, Human nature remains somewhat unpredictable. Knowing how to motivate each person on a team can be equally frustrating and challenging. Therefore, managers must acquire the knowledge of what truly inspires staff to perform at a high level.

Check out our course on: Motivational Leadership

Do you want to check out the courses first? Register now to get a free hour of CPD ‘Understanding Cryptocurrency‘.

3. Team Management – Management Skills

This topic area will help you effectively design, build, and manage a team. There are some tasks which can’t be done alone. Individuals need to come together, discuss things among themselves and work together towards a common goal. Every team is formed to achieve a predefined goal, and it’s the responsibility of each member to contribute his level best and accomplish the assigned task within a time frame. Team members must complement each other and come to each other’s help whenever required. Individual performances do not matter much in a team, and every individual should strive hard and work in unison.

4. Debt Securities: Drivers of Bond Valuations – Refresher Training

This course is designed to develop your understanding of the drivers of bond valuations. Unlike stocks, each bond contract has unique characteristics that define how repayment will occur. Every bond contract has at least five components: the borrower, price, date of maturity, value of maturity and coupon rate. We will also inspect how the risk of changes in bond value may be eliminated partially or fully with interest rate and credit default swaps.

5. Building an Effective Finance Team – Management Skills

This CPD course will examine the steps to assess your finance function and what it could look like in the future to be more effective. It will be followed by what steps could be taken to achieve the desired future state. Start by setting up your team and equipping its members with the necessary knowledge. This involves imparting the culture and philosophy of your business, two critical steps for which you’ll need to take your team’s feedback on board, get them involved, and create an environment conducive to design thinking.

Do you want to check out the courses first? Register now to get access to 2 free CPD courses instantly!