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- Knowledge and understanding of academic disciplines, which entails the process of learning and acquisition of knowledge. Within the accountancy field this encompasses general knowledge, organisational and business knowledge, information technology knowledge and accounting and accounting-related knowledge.
- Skills to enable the professional accountant to make successful use of the knowledge gained through education. Skills are not usually acquired from specific courses devoted to them but are derived from the education and training programme as a whole. The individual must acquire intellectual, interpersonal as well as communication skills.
- Professional values entail the development of a framework to ensure that chartered accountants exercise good judgement and act in an ethical manner that is in the best interests of society and the profession.
The objective of the education and training of prospective CAs is to ensure that they acquire the characteristics essential to membership of a profession. SAICA has defined these characteristics as follows:
- Members must demonstrate the capability to identify and solve problems in unfamiliar and changing situations, to think logically, to reason and to analyse critically;
- Members must acquire an understanding of the impact of economic, demographic, market, and technological forces on certain situations, so as to be able to assess them critically;
- Members have an obligation to put the interests of the public before their own, and exercise their skills in an independent and objective manner; and
- Members have an obligation to abide by a self-imposed code of conduct and professional ethics, and to identify and respond to ethical and moral issues by means of a values-based reasoning system
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