Stephen Flatman, vice-president–Education & Professional Qualifications at the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants, explains how the CGMA Professional Qualification (CGMA PQ) upgrade is designed to respond to the change of “shape” in the finance function and how those changes will propel businesses and expand opportunities for finance professionals.
Flatman discusses disruptions to role requirements and career development opportunities in a competitive job market and the skills and competencies required for finance professionals to drive organisations forward and future-proof their careers.
“I genuinely think we engineered the way we think about education, and that will transform the skills and competency acquisition of candidates going through the programme,” Flatman said. “We think that there’s real growth in the strategic and analytical roles that we’re preparing people for.”
What you’ll learn from this episode:
- External factors driving talent development challenges for employers.
- Some ways the CGMA PQ is changing to meet the growing requirements of the finance function.
- What an evolving finance function means for students and members.
- How a business-partnering focus aims to expand future finance professionals’ skillsets.
- Essential skills to empower professionals across various roles and industries.
Play the episode below or read the edited transcript:
— To comment on this episode or to suggest an idea for another episode, contact Steph Brown at Stephanie.Brown@aicpa-cima.com.
Transcript
Steph Brown: Welcome to the FM podcast. I’m Steph Brown. I’m joined by Stephen Flatman, vice-president–Education & Professional Qualifications at the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants. We are going to discuss the CGMA Professional Qualification upgrade, what the upgrade means for members and students, the broader implications for the profession, and how it intends to meet the growing demands of the finance function.
Welcome to the podcast, Stephen. Thanks for coming on.
Stephen Flatman: My pleasure. Thank you.
Brown: Before we get into the specifics of the CGMA Professional Qualification upgrade, let’s talk broadly about skill development in the profession. What are the top talent development challenges facing members?
Flatman: We’ve done extensive research on this. Finance team members are under a lot of pressure, especially when you’re thinking about talent development. What really impresses me, I think, whenever I talk to members, is what they really focus on is the developments of the next generation. A key part of their membership is passing it forward and thinking about, “How do we bring people into the profession?” I find that genuinely impressive.
But our members are dealing with lots of complexity. We’re seeing huge growth in technology. We’re seeing a huge demand for knowledge about sustainability, but we’re also seeing big changes in the wider environment that are really impacting them. One of the things that we’re seeing is the sort of hollowing out of jobs in the middle. So, there are low-wage jobs, for example. These might be food preparation or home healthcare, things that cannot be automated. They’re holding steady. We’re seeing this growth in these high-skilled jobs, and that’s been driven by technology, sustainability, and complexity.
But it’s a hollowing out of the jobs that used to exist when many of us entered the workplace five, ten, 20 years ago. These are the entry-level positions that no longer exist: bookkeeping, processing, those kind of things. The biggest question I get asked by members when I’m talking to them about the talent pipeline is, how do we bring people into the profession when those entry-level jobs, as we used to understand them, no longer exist?
Brown: I’d like to discuss how the CGMA PQ is changing to meet the growing demands of the profession. You touched on how some entry-level placements don’t really exist anymore. What traditional forms of accounting and finance education are still relevant, and what skills needed for the future skills economy are covered in this upgrade?
Flatman: There’s a lot to unpack there, but I think primarily what we’re looking at is that maybe five years ago, there was lots of conversations about the end of the profession. We’re looking at automation, we’re looking at AI, machine learning, robotic process automation, these kinds of things. And people were having discussions about the end of the profession. What we’re now seeing with gen AI is that the need for professional expertise is greater than ever.
To be a power user of gen AI, you need that professional expertise in order to write the right prompts, analyse the results, be able to spot hallucinations and these kinds of errors. That professional grounding is more important than ever. Actually, these traditional forms of accounting and finance knowledge still remain. They’re still our bedrock. But what’s changed is what you do with that information. Instead of producing, you’re often validating the information that’s being produced, and that’s an absolutely critical difference.
What you learn is probably the same; how you apply it has changed. I think that underpins some of the biggest changes that we’re making with the update to the qualification.
Brown: Let’s touch on changes to the job market and the finance function from the integration of those emerging technologies. How will the new syllabus respond to those changes, and will this also impact entry-level roles?
Flatman: Absolutely. There’s a number of things. The CGMA Professional Qualification has, for a long time, contained a lot of content on technology. We’ve updated, especially the sections on AI, to include sections on gen AI. We’ve also had extensive coverage of sustainability content. Again, in this update, we’ve just added to that, and in particular, adding in the sustainability standards and making that a key part of the examinations going forward.
The biggest change is a response to the changes in the job market. One of the arguments I would make is that traditional forms of professional education now need what I would call an operating system upgrade. In the past, the way that we would think about it was that the finance function was a triangle with one person at the top and lots of people at the bottom, and your entry-level positions are at the bottom. You would then do a professional training course, and you would start at the bottom level with the knowledge. Then, after a year or so, you start to move into application, and then maybe two or three years later, you’d start doing critical thinking.
The shape of the finance function has changed, but typically, traditional education has not changed. The new shape of the finance function is much more like a diamond. At the bottom of the diamond, there’s a lot more AI-automated processes. Entry-level roles have disappeared. The entry-level roles have now moved up to the value chain, so these entry-level jobs are now required to do critical thinking. They’re required to do analytical work to make recommendations.
The big change that we’re making to the qualification now is that we are matching the qualification to these entry-level roles. We are developing these critical thinking skills, these analytical skills, the ability to make recommendations in the first year of your studies and then throughout the entire programme, building on those competencies throughout. Rather than it being something that happens at the end, it’s something you do at the start, and we can evidence that.
One of the big changes that we’re doing is at the operational level. For example, in the business simulation exam that we have at the end of that first level, the verbs that we use have moved from preparing information to discussing information. That’s really reflecting the impact of AI, who produces information, and what you do with information. Placing a great deal more emphasis on finance business partnering, taking information, validating information, talking to people, analysing it, creating options, creating recommendations, enabling business decision-making. Something we do now in year one, and in year two, and in year three. So, really building those competencies and putting it at the heart of the professional qualification.
Brown: Going on from what you were saying about the increasing relevance of sustainability information, validating information, emerging technologies are becoming more important. How can students sitting for exams next year start to prepare for the changes introduced by the upgrade, and how can members prepare for the wave of changes coming?
Flatman: What we’ve done for students is that we’ve really thought carefully about the impacts that we have on students. Now, typically, these upgrades have deadlines and they distort your learning, and they force you to accelerate your studies or maybe do some gap learning. What we’ve done instead is a very different approach this time to minimise the disruption to students.
Actually, a lot of new learning content, for sustainability for example, was introduced in January this year for the subjects, the objective tests that people take, which means that they’ve already done learning for when that gets introduced into the case study exams in May 2026. In that way, there are no forced deadlines. There are no blackout periods. There’s no additional work that you need to do. For the vast majority of students, they will just continue with their studies. They will be introduced to the new content naturally as a normal part of their progress, and they would have covered the new content by the time they get to the case study exams.
Now, there may be some students whose studies are temporarily disrupted, for example, maybe on maternity leave, some other kind of leave, and we will produce additional top-up material to support those students. But for the vast majority of students, what I would say to them is just carry on with your studies. The new material is already embedded in the content. And when you come to the case study exams, if you’re with a case study preparation tuition provider, they will be ready to take you through that journey.
For members, it’s a different kind of question. I think what our members are looking at is a period of unprecedented change, a huge amount of challenges coming through. Whether that’s in regard to sustainability, or technology, or gen AI. That creates a great deal of uncertainty as they’re thinking about upskilling or reskilling. My advice to them is twofold. The first thing is members have a formidable set of skills. They have expert knowledge. They have critical thinking skills. They have systems thinking skills. They have strategic thinking skills. This is an enormous amount of skills in their toolbox for managing change.
As they look forward, I think the important thing to think about is the hype cycle. Where are these emerging technologies on the hype cycle? What is their attitude to risk? When are they ready to start thinking about adopting these new technologies or these changes? There’s a wide range of resources available from the AICPA and CIMA. There’s some [continuing professional development] products and the ones I would call out that anyone thinking about sustainability, in particular. We do have a couple of courses in conjunction with Oxford’s Saïd Business School, very much focusing on sustainability strategy associated with sustainability, and then the implementation of sustainability within the business.
There’s plenty of resources for them, but as I say, I think you have a formidable skillset. You’ve got this, as my friends would say. It’s just about identifying where you need to update your knowledge and then start to apply them.
Brown: Thanks for mentioning the resources. We’ll link to them in the show notes for this episode.
You mentioned at the CIMA President’s Future of Finance Conference earlier in May that updates to case study simulations will help students prepare for finance business partnering roles. Tell me more about this and what it means for the future of finance.
Flatman: Finance business partnering is very much at the core of the professional qualification. What we’re seeing for finance is a shift up the value chain, so very much focusing on analysis and strategy, really thinking about value creation. The role of the finance business partner is now to be embedded into the business to help produce value. And that might be thinking about short-term to long-term value creation, thinking about intangibles, thinking about the role of shareholders and stakeholders and our impact on society and communities, and thinking about business models and business models that have been transformed by technology or sustainability or both of them together.
With that in mind, there is a real focus now towards finance business partnering, and what we’re combining is a number of different things in the case study exams. Case study exams are business simulations, and we believe that through simulation, that’s the best way to prepare people for the world of work. We have these really true-to-life simulations. You never know which industry you might be involved in if you take one of these case study exams. But we’ve covered a whole range of things from forestry to extractive industries, to companies like Uber or companies like Netflix, or satellite companies or logistic companies.
In these business simulations, you take on the role of a person undertaking finance business partnering activities. What we expect you to do is combine the ethics associated with being a professional with your expert knowledge. Your knowledge is critical because it helps you explain what’s happening. It allows you to predict what might happen next, and it allows you to create alternatives. We then combine that with critical thinking skills or what we call power skills: analysis, making recommendations, problem-solving, decision-making, professional scepticism.
All of these things are aspects of critical thinking that ultimately bring you to producing the artifacts in the exam, just like you produce in the workplace. These are emails, reports, Word documents, documents that make an argument and ultimately work towards recommendations. I think this is a key differentiator for us. In these case study exams, what we’re always doing is moving along a value chain from producing or validating information to generating insights, to then generating recommendations, ultimately leading to decisions.
Each one of the three levels in the qualification, we’re always pushing towards making recommendations. The reason that we do that is because when we think about, what is high performance? What does a high-performing finance business partner look like? I would argue you don’t need to be an accountant to recognise what high performance looks like. The people who stand out in your organisations are typically people who come to you and say, “I’ve been thinking about this, and I think we could do something better, or we could make an improvement here, or we could save money.”
These are people who don’t bring you problems. They bring you solutions; they bring you options. This is very much the behaviour or the mindset that the three case study exams are reinforcing and encouraging. It’s not just finance business partnering, it’s not just the production of information or insights. It’s actually thinking about what the high-performing people look like to really propel businesses and their own careers.
Brown: Are there any final thoughts on the CGMA PQ upgrade you’d like to leave listeners with?
Flatman: What I hope I leave you with is a real sense of, across the entire organisation with our members, with our governance, is a real sense of optimism about the profession, the opportunities that are available to our members, to CGMAs. Actually, we think that there’s real growth in the strategic and analytical roles that we’re preparing people for. I hope you have that sense of optimism and share that optimism with us, and also that sense of pride in the CGMA Professional Qualification. I genuinely think we engineered the way we think about education, and that will transform the skills and competency acquisition of candidates going through the programme.
They develop these expert thinking skills so they can look at problems and, using their experience and their intuition, know the kind of responses that you’d have to those problems. That they can use their critical thinking skills so that they can step back, challenge their assumptions, perform new forms of analysis, work with people across the business to create options, and ultimately make recommendations. But to also develop systems thinking skills; to have the ability to step back from a problem, see all the connected parts of the problem, and how that manifests.
Lastly, strategic thinking skills; the ability to think about problems in the long term and how you might systematically overcome those problems. I think when you combine that with the knowledge of finance, technology, sustainability, these thinking skills, it’s an incredible skillset. I think it does set people up for life. It takes you to many places, many different career destinations. I hope you get the sense of pride we have in the qualification and the optimism for the profession.
Brown: Thank you so much.
Flatman: My pleasure. Thank you.
