Business Learning Institute Offers CPA Career Curriculum

The Business Learning Institute has developed a career curriculum for CPAs who want to gain competencies to become leaders in their firms, along with new tools for firms to use in attracting new talent.

The curriculum includes a 5x5 matrix that maps the critical competencies that CPAs will need with the five major career steps in many CPA firms: staff, supervisor, manager, senior manager or junior partner, and partner. BLI is building career curriculums mapped to courses that provide firms with a way to approach succession planning and talent development.

BLI also announced a set of new tools Sunday to help organizations win the war for talent. The new tools include the Bounce, a learning framework based on the latest competency research about the top five critical success skills for the future, social learning tools to increase learner engagement, a leadership academy, on-demand leadership courses, and a learning management system that supports a strategic and systematic approach to talent development and succession planning.

A 2012 survey on the competition for talent by the Corporate Executive Board found that 60 percent of organizations were experiencing a leadership shortage, an increase of 40 percentage points from the previous year. Another survey by Ernst & Young entitled, “Paradigm Shift: Building a New Talent Management Model to Boost Growth” states, “The scarcity of talent is quickly turning out to be the biggest obstacle to growth.”

“BLI’s strategic approach and tools to support learning begin to address the paradigm shift referenced in the E&Y study,” said Business Learning Institute CEO Tom Hood, who is also CEO and executive director of the Maryland Association of CPAs.

BLI has a catalog of more than 400 courses in multiple formats covering various competencies and career ladders, allowing organizations to quickly develop and manage a portfolio of learning that includes live, instructor-led, webcast, on-demand e-learning and social learning components.

The Bounce is a learning framework from BLI that takes the latest competency research on skills needed, maps them to a career ladder and creates a 5x5 matrix that gives organizations a learning framework to systematically develop their talent. The matrix maps to a portfolio of hundreds of courses available in multiple formats that address talent development needs in today’s rapidly changing and complex environment.

“In a period of rapid change and increasing complexity, the winners are going to be the organizations and people who can learn faster than the rate of change and faster than their competition,” Hood said in a statement. “We believe learning and talent development is the only sustainable competitive advantage.”

For more information, visit www.blionline.org.