CPA / CA for TM1 professional : Helpful ?

[TF34375]

Hi,

I have heard guys with CA / CPA taking fat salaries. Also seen few TM1 jobs on SEEK.com asking for CPA/CA certification.

How useful is doing CA/CPA for a TM1 professional..... I mean from opportunity and remuneration perspective !
And other things to consider before jumping in to do it....

[Martin Ryan]

Depends. If you want a CPA/CA job where the tool is TM1 then yes, e.g. a management or financial accountant, then it would undoubtedly be useful. If however you want to be a TM1 administrator who manages financial applications then I'd say it's not worth the time and money.

I happen to have an accounting degree but I really only use the stuff I learnt in semester 1 (debits vs credits, P&Ls). Being a CA would be completely superfluous. My computer science degree is far more useful for being a TM1 administrator but even that I would say is a nice to have rather than a necessity. Teaching yourself VBA as an example programming language would qualify you enough to start learning to write TI/Rule code

[macsir]

CPA / CA helps you on domain knowledge in finance. But without profound IT knowledge, you can only swim on the surface of TM1 ocean.

[Alan Kirk]

I agree with both Martin and Macsir's replies... but there is an increasing problem these days of some employers (not all, but a disturbingly large subset) who demand, for example, MBAs even for a position in the mail room. (OK, perhaps that's slight hyperbole, but not as much as I'd like it to be.)

True, such employers end up with people who have expectations of "something better" and are planning an exit strategy from the second they start work. True, the study that the new hires did may not be germane to the work that they're asked to do. Doubly true, the companies in question may end up with the churn rate of a DC-3's propellers... but you get this anyway.

At one time when I had an assistant position to fill I was pushed from above to get someone who had CPA or CA qualifications and I had to push back on that (hard, eventually) because I knew full well that someone who has buried a substantial chunk of their lifespan in getting a CPA certainly was not going to be someone who planned to stay around in an assistant TM1 administrator role for very long. So they'd come in, immediately register on Seek, and by the time you've trained them up enough to be actually useful in the role they'd have handed in their notice.

I'd much prefer someone who has hands on experience, basic aptitude and an appetite to do the work... but the longer the disconnect between the person who's setting the hiring criteria and the people who have to do/rely on the work is, the more likely there is to be a requirement for irrelevant qualifications in the advertisement.