Other than pure luck, what I actually needed was a reference to someone who had the authority to hire me.
KARACHI: This is with reference to cases where many big companies have become affiliated with the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) to promote careers in accounting, such as Toyota Motors. Whilst these collaborative actions are certainly commendable on the part of ACCA, are they actually worth anything to the students?
Having completed my ACCA in 2011 after passing all 14 papers on the first attempt, I was quite keen to get a good job or internship in a reputed organisation to pursue the field that I chose as my career.
However, after rejection from the big four audit firms and many multinational companies and after being rejected by many ACCA affiliates, I finally got the much-needed advice. I didn’t need to be an ACCA affiliate or an ACCA enrolled student. Other than pure luck, what I actually needed was a reference to someone who had the authority to hire me.
Indeed, the ACCA kept charging me the subscription fees in pounds to keep me enrolled as a student. Finally, a gentleman gave me an internship opportunity in the marketing industry and thus ended my tedious and useless journey as an ACCA affiliate.
It is also worth mentioning here that the ACCA affiliation is not recognised by the Higher Education Commission and hence, I cannot do my master’s and further my education. So I resorted to pursuing a bachelor’s degree from Karachi University.
I would like to request an independent regulatory authority to kindly run a monitoring check on the marketing campaigns carried out by ACCA Pakistan as they seem more inclined towards revenue generation than an unbiased effort at decreasing unemployment for their students.
Amna Billoo
Published in The Express Tribune, April 17th, 2014.
Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.
