Be Future Ready

Over the past few years, industries, businesses, and organizations of every size and nature, and the CPAs and professionals who serve them, have experienced profound and persistent change.

Research shows that, more than ever before, CPAs are being called upon to help protect their organizations, steward through disruption, and lead into uncharted territory.

Experts say change is the new normal. So how can CPAs get ready for what’s next?

Becoming future-ready means to anticipate changes and challenges, and proactively plan for career transitions and transformations.

Future-ready CPAs have the skills to:

• Understand and navigate through social, technological, economic, environmental, and political change
• Rethink situations, shift mindsets, and embrace change
• Provide insight and foresight to solve business problems and create value as finance business partners
• Demonstrate ethics and professionalism to protect, steward, and lead strategically

Whether you are confident about your future-readiness or realize you need more confidence, many professionals agree that being prepared is the only option to stay relevant and valued in today’s uncertain economy.

Becoming future-ready involves building, exploring, learning, and leading with purpose.

You can start to assess your future-readiness by reflecting on these questions:

• Are you set to access new opportunities or bridge gaps between demands and expectations?
• Do you explore new approaches and ideas with CPAs and others?
• Do you purposefully upskill and reskill?
• Do you refine your leadership skills in order to improve how you lead others, and yourself?

To support Alberta CPAs in meeting the demands of tomorrow, CPA Alberta is pleased to introduce four services initiatives: CPA Build^©, CPA Explore, CPA Learn, and CPA Lead. Each offers accounting and finance professionals with the tools, articles, webinars, podcasts, and/or learning experiences to become future-ready. To learn more, click on each below.

Why is it important to be future-ready?

Let’s face it: change is stressful. It can be worse when it's unexpected.

These may be some of the stressors and/or reasons for change that you are currently experiencing:

• Business contexts that are volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous
• The process of change and transformation (too fast or too slow)
• Challenges with workload and work/life balance
• Expected or unexpected career transitions
• The challenges that come with career transformations
• Uncertainty about how to remain relevant and valued
• Struggles to gain control of your career with a future-readiness mindset
• Limited time or not knowing where to start to become future-ready

By becoming future-ready, you can avoid the stressors and risks of unplanned career transitions or transformations and beat the bell curve.

What does it mean to ‘beat the BELL curve’?

Rogers Adoption Curve – often illustrated as a classic bell curve – describes how new ideas and innovation are typically accepted and adopted, with the innovators and early adopters at the front, followed by the early majority, late majority and laggards.

For CPAs, the expectation would be to stay ahead of the curve, or to beat the bell curve.

How?

When we think of future-readiness for CPAs, we use BELL as an acronym for Build, Explore, Learn, and Lead. Beat the bell curve by building skills, exploring new approaches and ideas, learning future-ready skills, and leading or helping others lead through mentorship or ambassadorship.