IMA hits record high of new CMAs in 2021

The Institute of Management Accountants released its annual review Tuesday, highlighting the fact that it had reached a record high number of 46,859 active Certified Management Accountants, with 12,926 new certifications earned in the past fiscal year.

In addition, 29,589 new CMA candidates joined the program in the fiscal year ending June 30, 2021. The report showed that 13% of all CMAs were certified in the past fiscal year, while 50% were certified in the last five years. The year ended with the IMA closing in on the 100,000th CMA since the program’s inception.

Institute membership was at similar levels before the pandemic at the end of fiscal year 2019. Globally, IMA membership has increased 71% over the past five years. The CMA has continued to grow the number of active CMAs over the past year to help organizations cope with the COVID-19 pandemic and dangerous new variants that have emerged.

“As organizations reconfigure themselves for a new normal that is constantly evolving, I am confident the entire IMA community will meet the multitude of challenges with courage, care, and conviction of purpose,” said IMA president and CEO Jeff Thomson in a statement. “I have tremendous optimism about the future because I know our members are steering their organizations in the right direction and helping them adapt to the volatile and uncertain global environment that we all face.”

Courtesy of the IMA

The pandemic has led to increased demands on accountants, who have needed to help organizations adapt to remote technology and supply chain constraints and shortages.

“A lot of different industries are seeing supply chain issues, and unfortunately to some extent it creates a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy,” IMA CFO Russ Porter recently told Accounting Today. “When people get concerned about supply chain issues, they immediately work to create their own supply, thus creating the bottleneck that they were anticipating in the future.”

Those supply chain shortages played out during Thanksgiving celebrations this past holiday weekend. “Turkeys were rumored to be in short supply, so everyone went out and bought the turkeys,” said Porter. “The same is true in other industries and in business to business. When we hear about potential shortages of fuel or steel or labor or any raw materials, people scramble to secure their own supply of those things, thus creating some of the supply chain issues that we’re hearing about.”

Accountants can help businesses adapt. “A lot of this is about predictive capabilities,” said Porter. “It’s about understanding how to respond and react to supply chain issues. Management accountants and finance people, financial leaders especially, are in a really great position in their organizations typically because they have the end-to-end view of their organization’s value chain. They can see how an impact affecting one end of their value chain can impact or be affected by other parts of it. ... With that ability to see end to end, to keep that systemic perspective, finance is in a great position because we understand the operational side, we understand the client side, and we often understand the shareholder’s side or the business owner’s side, so we know how to balance and pivot better between those three than those who are really restricted to one of those silos.”

During a year in which many organizations and society grappled with issues of racial inequity, the IMA partnered with accounting organizations nationally and globally to produce research revealing a significant diversity gap in the accounting and finance profession. The institute said it remains committed to improving diversity, equity and inclusion gaps, and plans to issue global research DE&I reports, a solutions report in response to the original research, and form more strategic partnerships.

In addition, as the accounting profession, investors and stakeholders are asking for more nonfinancial information related to climate disclosures, the IMA expanded its thought leadership on sustainability and formed a Sustainable Business Management Global Task Force to advocate on behalf of the management accounting profession before governments, regulatory bodies, and other stakeholders. The IMA provided guidance on disclosures, measurements and decision making for professionals in relation to sustainable business metrics.

The annual report is available for download on the IMA’s website.

Separately, the IMA also recently issued a report on data visualization earlier this month discussing the increasingly important role of dynamic visuals in finance and accounting. The report, authored by Ann Dzuranin, a professor of accountancy at Northern Illinois University, describes the different types of data visualizations, how to create effective visualizations, and how to tell a story with data.