IMA Website: https://www.imanet.org/

About the CMA Certification: https://www.imanet.org/cma-certification

For nearly 50 years, the CMA® (Certified Management Accountant) certification has been the global benchmark for management accountants and financial professionals. Why? Because CMAs can explain the "why" behind numbers, not just the "what." And that can give you greater credibility, higher earning potential, and ultimately a seat at the leadership table.

FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Adam (00:05):

Welcome back for a special bonus episode of IMA's Count Me In podcast. As you know, this series is dedicated to bring you the latest perspectives and learnings on all things affecting the accounting and finance world, as told by the experts working in the field and thought leaders shaping the profession. Well, IMA is pleased to announce that it has continued to shape the profession through its CMA certification and has just officially certified it's 100,000th. To celebrate this milestone IMA has planned a month long celebration to promote the impact the CMA has had on the accounting and finance profession. To kick off the celebration, IMA's brand content and storytelling manager, Margaret Michaels, spoke with IMA's senior vice-president of certifications, exams, and constant integration, Dennis Whitney, about the state of management accounting profession and the trends impacting its future. Keep listening to hear this insightful and celebratory discussion about IMA's CMA program.

Margaret (01:08):

Great. Well thank you Dennis for joining the Count Me In podcast. The first question is about the certified management accountant or CMA program that was launched in 1972 by IMA. Can you tell me a little bit about what the impetus for creating a certification program like this was?

Dennis (01:30):

Yeah sure Margaret, thank you for having me today. I'm very happy to talk about the CMA program. Yeah, it's interesting, back in the 1960s, IMA started seriously thinking about a certification program. The impetus behind that was that rightly so they believe that management accounting was a distinct profession from public accounting and that the competencies needed inside organizations were different from public accounting. There was quite a bit of overlap. You know, financial accounting is necessary both for public accountants and accountants working inside the company, but there are distinct competencies, cost management, financial planning, and analysis that are very important for accountants working inside organization. So they identified that need and they started the planning process to develop the CMA program. And it took several years of planning, but they had their first Board of Regents meeting in the beginning of 1972 and rolled out the first exam in December of 1972.

Margaret (02:44):

Wow. So the CMA has a long history and how does IMA ensure that the program is relevant to the profession right now and evolves alongside it?

Dennis (02:56):

Yeah, the CMA program has evolved quite a bit over these, almost 50 years now. You know, when we first developed the CMA in 1972, there was more of a focus on cost accounting, but today the focus is more on a planning, analysis, decision support, and also technology and data analytics. So the way we keep up with the profession is, you know, we're constantly scanning the environment, reading research papers, talking to CFOs, corporate controllers. But what we also do is every six years or so, five to six, seven years, we do what's called a job analysis survey. So with that, we identify the tasks that management accountants do every day and what they need to know to do their job efficiently and effectively. And so from that research, we're able to develop the content specification outlines and the new exam and keep up to date with the profession.

Margaret (04:02):

And how does continuing education fit into the CMA program?

Dennis (04:07):

Yeah, well, you know, it's interesting that you use the word program because the CMA is a program. It's not just the exam. When you finish the exam, you're required to do 30 hours of continuing education every year, including two hours of ethics and the reason for that is management accountants need to stay on top of the latest trends in the profession. They need to develop new skills, new techniques. You know, if you got your CMA 20 years ago, you know, most of that knowledge is still relevant, but there are new skills and in order to maintain your relevance on your job and add value to your company and also help you develop your career, it's very important that you keep your skills current. So that's why we have the continuing education as part of the program.

Margaret (04:58):

That makes sense. And I'm sure that continuing education aspect appeals to a lot of professionals who are looking to stay current right now. In looking at the growth of the CMA program, it seems as if the CMA has been growing most significantly in the last five years with 50,000 CMAs added from 2016 to the present. And for perspective, it took 50 years or from 1972 to 2016 to reach the first 50,000 CMAs. So what trends do you think are contributing to the CMA's astronomical growth in the last five years?

Dennis (05:39):

Well there are a couple of factors that go into that. First of all, for most of our history, we were pretty much a US, primarily a US certification. I mean, we are still a US certification, but our candidate growth has expanded beyond the US. So about 10 years or so ago, we started seriously looking to develop markets overseas. So we've seen tremendous growth overseas. Now we're still, we're growing actually quite well in the US, but we're actually growing very, very well overseas, especially China. We've seen tremendous growth in China. But we've also seen growth in Europe, middle east, very strong growth in the middle east over last 10 years. And India, India is a market now that's really growing quite a bit. And also Southeast Asia, for example, in the Philippines and Vietnam. So it's a global growth and that's attributed, contributed a lot to the growth of the program. The other thing is that we've, we really work hard to communicate the value of the CMA. And for example, we have every year now for the last, I'm not exactly sure how many years, five years or so, we've been doing a commercial and an ad campaign where we make sure that we tell the public, not just our CMA's and our candidates, but tell corporations through business development and tell the public through marketing, how relevant the CMA is. So that increasing exposure has more people who know about the CMA and more people who realize the importance of the CMA, particularly hiring managers. So we're seeing, for example, more ads saying CMA preferred and I think those are the reasons primarily for the growth. Well, one other thing actually is a bigger exposure on the university campuses. So more students are interested in the program as well.

Margaret (07:54):

That makes a lot of sense and clearly now more than ever, hiring managers and organizations are faced with challenges revolving around rebuilding post COVID and the talent war that we hear about where there's fierce competition for CMAs in particular. So as organizations look to build a more enhanced digital capabilities and transform their finance and accounting departments, how does the CMA specifically prepare them for those types of challenges?

Dennis (08:35):

Well the CMA has a very unique set of skills. So, y...

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