This accountant is mining her potential – by Virginia Galt (Globe and Mail – July 5, 2013)

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

Ikram Al Mouaswas’s career as a chartered accountant has taken her – in hard hat and steel-toed boots – to remote mining projects in India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the Northwest Territories, and Northern Ontario’s Ring of Fire region.

A manager in Deloitte Canada’s assurance and advisory group, Ms. Al Mouaswas specializes in commodity mining – diamonds, gold, nickel, copper. “I love the mining industry. It’s changing every day. There’s always a complex or interesting transaction going on.” It’s rewarding work with a demanding schedule.

Still, every fall, Ms. Al Mouaswas and her colleagues at Deloitte engage in some prospecting of their own – blanketing Canadian university campuses in search of the next generation of accounting professionals. “Recruiting season” starts in September, and wraps up by Thanksgiving. And the war for talent is fierce, Ms. Al Mouaswas says.

“The big [professional accounting] companies and some of the mid-sized ones, as well, heavily recruit. They go out there and have events, rent banquet halls and bring out as many of their representatives as they can to tell the students about their firms, about the advantages, about their own experiences.”

The employment prospects for accountants are excellent, says Jacques Maurice, an accounting professor in the commerce program at Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business. “I would say for the good students, the strong students … the placement rate is probably 100 per cent on graduation.”

Students who have done co-op terms are typically snapped up by the employers they were placed with, and the remaining grads who are not hired right out of school tend to land jobs within six months, Prof. Maurice says.

At the entry level, the challenge for recruiters is that “we are all after the top candidates,” says Craig Irwin, a partner in Deloitte Canada’s assurance and advisory group. Deloitte invests heavily in its recruits, helping them prepare for their accounting exams and offering a range of work experiences and professional advancement opportunities. As they become more experienced, more specialized and more marketable, the challenge is to retain them.

A recent survey on the demand for accounting and finance professionals, conducted by Hays Recruiting, found “key shortages … particularly in niche roles, including: property accountants, specialist knowledge in mining and construction, cost accounting, financial analysis, bilingualism, payroll managers and financial and management reporting.”

Here’s a look at what it takes to become an accountant and the skills employers want.

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