Sitting with a friend at a coffee shop discussing about the current global crunch and wondering when things will take good shape, I came to know that our accountancy body, i.e., ACCA (The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants), has grown by more than 400,000 students. This number is huge enough to fill 4 stadiums equivalent to 4 and a half Wembley Stadiums, London.

I rechecked the statistics and came to know that my friend was wrong. The figure is actually 404,000 students, according to one corporate group*, a rise of almost 10% from last year. According to the website, ACCA also opened offices in Brussels, Bangladesh, Chengdu and Macau.

So the question in my mind was, can we really accommodate all these ACCA students? With the global economy growth rate of less than 10% and with the student’s growth rate of more than ten percent seems to widen the gap. I talked with Mr. Asrar ul Haq of Alhamd Academy about this issue and he denied to give any comments on global effect but he mentioned that in Pakistan, things are getting worse for even accountants. Reasons? He said that with growing cost of business and high competition from neighboring countries, companies started to cut their expenses and unluckily accountants, in their perception, is a luxury which they cannot afford now. But Mr. Asrar also believes that if the accountancy community started to behave more proactively and prove that they are visionary and trust worthy, things could change for both, the businesses and accountants.

Despite claims from the industry that there is a rise in demand from accountants, many still doubt it. I talked to a group of students and they said that before they entered into the qualification, there was less competition than now. We believe that now we have to equip ourselves with additional skills because of the demanding employers taking advantage of current economic turmoil. We talked with Mr. Bilal Siddiqui, resident editor of Pakistanacca.com in Karachi. He rejects the claim from the students about the employers taking advantage of the situation. "Actually the world is moving fast due to its technological advancements. No one knew about Youtube and Facebook a few years ago and now IT students are learning new courses to develop applications and games on these new mediums. The demanded IT area in year 2007 were Facebook application developer, which never existed two years before that. How can we (accountants) stay away from not meeting the requirements of advancing needs of economy, he added.

He further argues, "Students, worldwide, are just considering that a single qualification is enough. They have to realize that this is not the matter of filling jobs. It’s not like the companies are JUST filling positions. If they cannot find a competitive manager, they simply leave the post unfilled.

So do you think these future four hundred thousand potential ACCA accountants could be employed? We asked him.

"I am not sure about everyone and any particular region but the beauty of ACCA is that students can move anywhere in the world and global crises are not exactly global anymore. If there are few jobs in one region then there are more jobs in another. Things are not as bad as we sometimes believe".

So, when I conclude the discussion in a nut shell, I see that the question wasn’t set right. It should not be discussed whether companies can provide enough jobs to employ all those future affiliates, it should be more like, Can we train our youth to think themselves as a future Job producer (entrepreneur in short) instead of job seeker. But again, one more question which disturbs me, is does our field have any capacity to innovate new services? Just give me five new services that accountancy related companies could introduce?