Advanced Upskilling Approaches

Amidst the recent news, we asked the opinion of Russian companies regarding the prospects for advanced methods such as adaptive learning or nano-learning in upgrading the professional skills of accountants and auditors. This is what the market participants think of the situation.

Veronika Arakelova, Head of Accounting Department, BDO Unicon Outsourcing

Adaptive self-study can be effective for multi-skilled accounting professionals, who practice IFRS and GAAP accounting for foreign companies operating in Russia. However for the beginners, i.e. graduates, this training model can hardly be effective.

It is important to understand that not only theoretical knowledge, but also experience is of great importance for professional accountants and financial experts. Moreover, the experience of financiers is completely based on the variety of tasks they faced during their practical work.
I often come across candidates who have various certificates from different courses, but they cannot be applied in current work without a specific practical adaptation.

As of today, the requirements for accountants have changed. They must be experts with a broad professional horizon based on diverse practical knowledge. Such experts can improve their knowledge using the adaptive self-training: monitor changes in legislation and additional explanations, updates to accounting programs, etc. Such educational format is not suitable for beginner accountants. You can improve the quality of such training by tightening the so-called terms of enrolment. That is, a self-trained student must have a specific experience, related higher education, etc. Otherwise, it is rather difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of such training. 

Boris Halimovsky, co-founder of the Courson educational platform:

In many levels of the education system, it is still impossible to completely disengage from a live instructor while maintaining significant efficiency. Young children need emotional interaction, and university students look for the professor’s depth of knowledge and thinking. Currently, both factors are difficult to simulate using a computer program.

But this is not a problem for students of colleges and secondary vocational institutions, including those majoring in financial studies. For them, the electronic system offers advantages through adaptive learning. Scientists have proven that students process information in different ways. They have identified the following seven styles: visual, auditory, conversational, kinesthetic, logical, social, and individual. The training program makes it possible to mix styles and create the best approach to each trainee. This is the future of education.

Thanks to modern educational formats, self-study becomes easier and more accessible, and therefore more popular. With the development of technology, the number of those engaged in self-education will continue to grow. Offline seminars still predominate over the tools enabling to effectively upgrade interpersonal skills, such as leadership. And there are many online courses making it possible to obtain professional knowledge and improve personal performance. Those who care for professional and career growth actively attend such courses.

Thus, according to the statistics of the Courson educational platform, the popular areas of professional knowledge include Agile software, foreign economic activity, scribing, HR, Internet marketing, management, sales, and finance. The platform users are consistently interested in the SMM (Social Media Marketing). As many as 2,700 people completed marketing training in social networks, which accounts for 73% of all trainees in the Internet marketing category. The platform users are actively upgrading their skills of personal performance — more than 5,100 trainees per year. The champion among all video lectures offered by the platform is a course from the “Personal Performance” category, dedicated to setting and achieving goals. Over a year, this course attracted 2,800 trainees. 

Svetlana Kazantseva, expert of TechnoProgress:

The idea of ​​adaptive learning is that education adapts to the ‘learning curve’ of the student. This method enables the teacher to identify the problem topics of the student and quickly restructure the process to eliminate them. The instructor’s possibility to respond to the results of an individual student in a real-time environment may well increase the likelihood of timely receiving the correct educational content and, as a result, achieving the set goals.

Technologies for implementing this kind of training are quite expensive, and so far not all participants in the educational process can use them. However, the method of adaptive learning is becoming more popular and arouses a growing interest in scientific circles in the context of artificial intelligence development. Today, you may already find similar training systems in operation, for example, personalized tips or learning interfaces resembling computer games.

In the fall semester of 2011, Arizona State University launched an experiment on the use of adaptive learning. The preliminary results of the experiment showed that the student performance improved by 18%, and the percentage of expulsions fell by 47%. The experiment also had a significant economic effect: the program helped the University of Arizona to earn $12 million in additional tuition. Thus, the method is effective both for the trainee through improving the retention of the material, and for the trainer in terms of increasing income.

Adaptive learning is definitely a suitable upskilling method to be used by Russian accountants. As a rule, groups include students with different levels of knowledge: someone has skills only in one area, and someone knows a little of everything. Adaptive learning allows you to personalize data about students’ knowledge and build individual learning paths, i.e. pay more attention to some topics and less – to others; change the sequence of learning topics.

What can you say about today’s practice, and how common is self-study? Experience shows that a sufficiently large percentage of accountants are not ready to switch to self-education only, because this process requires a regular and systematic approach, much time and willpower. For the purpose of self-education, many accountants often turn to educational offline and online platforms; therefore, I think that adaptive education for upskilling will be perceived positively by them.