New ICAEW recuitment drive uses CPD as key offering

A new recruitment drive by the ICAEW is targeting rival institutes, using
CPD to attract members.

Known as Pathways, the scheme is aimed at ACCA, CIMA and CIPFA members with
at least five years’ experience to pass an examination based around a case
study.

The institute claimed that experienced members of other bodies were looking
to take advantage of its ‘rigorous programme of CPD’, an area where it
controversially split off from collaboration with other CCAB members.

‘The exam is just as rigorous as other routes from those institutes into the
ICAEW, if not more so,’ claimed Dr Raymond Madden, ICAEW executive director of
learning and professional development.

Madden said the process was different from that of undertaking extra exams to
fill knowledge gaps that arose from being a member of another institute, and was
more suited to experienced accountants: ‘It tests competencies in an applied
way, not sitting in an exam hall and assessed.’

Madden said that no numerical target had been set to gauge the success of the
recruitment scheme, but it was ‘about getting the best [accountants] into the
institute’.

He revealed that CPD would be more oriented towards putting the ‘onus onto
the learner’, with the institute helping members reflect on their development
and then act. UK corporate giants Shell and Barclays had expressed interest in
the institute’s CPD methodology, Madden added.

Two ICAEW members would have to sponsor the applicant, who must have a clean
disciplinary record.