Inside scoop from a corporate icon

After completing his Masters in Economics from York University, Naved Manzoor joined British American Tobacco Bangladesh Ltd. in 2004 as a Management Trainee in Finance. Currently, he is serving the same organisation as the Head of Supply Chain Finance. Despite having a fast-track and splendid career in Finance, he felt the urge to pursue a professional degree during the middle of his career. And the ACCA was his preferred option, as he considered it to be one of the key accelerators of career growth. On top of his official work, he devotes part of his time towards studying the ACCA.

1. What prompted you to take up ACCA at such a point in your career?
As finance professionals, our main job is to facilitate credible commercial decisions within the business. For this, one would need a blend of technical skills, commercial acumen and the right social skills. Degrees, like ACCA, ensure a solid perception of having at least the theoretical knowledge in these dimensions. It also assures the employer regarding your integrity and professional standards.
However, the other important aspect is that such a certification makes you more competitive as a candidate in career moves. For example, I work in a multinational organisation with extensive global presence and hence, career mobility. Not having an ACCA qualification at this point would make me less competitive in pursuing a new and bigger challenge than a person in Vietnam with a similar profile and ACCA-qualified.

2. What kind of pre-existing skills are requisite for a finance career after completing a professional degree such as ACCA?
I always believe that finance as a profession demands greater responsibility from its professionals in safeguarding organisational interest. As such, finance professionals should be multi-skilled beyond functional boundaries. It requires a certain degree of maturity and institutional training to be able to envisage the holistic picture of a business. I would always recommend a young student to pursue ACCA in parallel to an institutional education in any commerce discipline. This will help them become more rounded as a potential choice for a finance position.
However, pre-existing skills with numbers and analytics in general and good MIS skills will definitely complement an ACCA qualification. Most importantly, one should have a knack for quantitative analytics and the passion for driving the overall business.

3. A CA certification allows professionals to expand their careers abroad, if they want. Does ACCA have similar prospects abroad? What are the career prospects in the country?
T the biggest challenge for a Bangladeshi professional to get into an international career is marketability in the global arena. Your degree of competitiveness will depend on the level of relevant experience, institutional education and professional qualification – all of which must be recognised by the potential employer. I cannot comment on which is the more lucrative of the two, but ACCA should be a safe bet for international employers owing to its global penetration and reputation. The organisation I work for recognises ACCA as a competitive degree for overseas positions.
In Bangladesh, recognition of ACCA is widespread. In the finance section of BAT Bangladesh, we search for well-rounded business graduates, and afterwards push and encourage them to pursue a professional qualification such as ACCA. A business graduate with an ACCA qualification gets further mileage. Having said that, there are other aspects like leadership, communication skill and behavioural traits that are equally important.  

4. CA certification was all the rage back in the day, and was seen as a rewarding path to take. Recently, the appeal of the CA certification has lessened, and has been replaced by more people pursuing ACCA. Do you see ACCA being replaced by other professional degrees in the future?
I am not aware that CA certification is losing its popularity or being replaced by ACCA. But if so, I would reckon this may be because of shifting career preferences from a traditional accounting job, such as an auditor, towards industry jobs. Qualifications like ACCA not only develop technical skills of a person, but also help in producing industry-fit business managers. It also has a global reputation with an impressive association. It will be hard to replace what ACCA offers to finance professional.

5. What would one expect, experience and salary-wise, once they enter the job market with an ACCA degree?
Like with any other profession, a finance professional with an ACCA degree should take his career as a long-term project once they enter the job market. And just like with any other project, it is important to devise short to mid-term milestones on the basis of where you want to see yourself at the end of each stage. A carefully crafted development plan is crucial for success in each of the phases. Your knowledge from ACCA and understanding of the business processes forms the basis of your development plan. It helps in applying ourselves as finance managers in accordance to the need of each of the phases of our career. One should never limit the scope of learning, but organising the scope is often the key. ACCA or other equivalent degrees provides us with the tools to organise ourselves better to learn and grow within an organisation. Rewards will always follow.

ACA, ACCA and CIMA – which is suitable for whom?
In today's global business environment, no single qualification restricts an individual in having a dynamic finance career. Any of these degrees should be good enough to pursue any stream of career within finance as long as it's well-recognised and is as per individual choice. But if I have to go by the merit of the degrees, I would say ACA qualification is suitable for someone who wants to pursue a traditional accounting career such as auditing, while ACCA should be more relevant for individuals who want to pursue a career primarily in financial control or new developments, like finance shared services. CIMA is more appropriate for a career in commercial finance.

Interviewed by Shahriar Rahman