IF YOU’RE RECEIVING the job alerts everyday — indeed, you may even have applied for some jobs already — but you’re still not getting called up for interview, then the following questions of doubt may be brewing:
Don’t you just love something new? Some entrepreneurs I know call it the “shiny object” syndrome because it means you’re always focusing your time and energy on something new, rather than doing the daily drudge work. But this is exciting.
I haven’t had a chance to speak with every registrant but this image shows the EzyLearn students who’ve completed our accounting & bookkeeping courses and would love to be tutors to help other students understand how the software is used in the real world.
You’ve spent hours fine-tuning your resume or CV and you go to SEEK or other job boards only to find that they ask if you want to write a cover letter. You don’t really, do you? But here’s why you need to.
Our team did a little research into job sites for accounting jobs and thought we’d explore a bit about why people like using the major job board in Australia.
The biggest reason is that they are the biggest job board in Australia so most advertisers spend the little bit extra to promote their positions available at the site. But there are some great tools for job seekers to be registered on the site. Continue reading Reasons Why Seek is Number 1 for Accounting Job Search
If you’re looking for a job it’s a daunting process because you have to sell yourself to an employer and most people don’t have to do this very often. Parents returning from parenting can find it particularly daunting because they’ve found themselves surrounded by nappies, cleaning, cooking and washing and the thought of presenting themselves to other adults can be scary.
I’ve spoken to some EzyLearn students in the last couple weeks about our Accounting Course Tutor Initiative and have been impressed at how capable many of them (you) are!
You can pay companies which, for a fee, will provide you with these services bundled together.
Oftentimes, they will also include in the bundle a logo and website. You then build your own website, using their templated options, for an ongoing monthly fee.
Why smaller job sites are not always best for smaller, one-off jobs
WHILE AUSTRALIA HAS NO shortage of jobs sites, only one of them dominates the Australian job market: Seek. It’s the largest and most profitable job board in the country — and the operator of leading sites around the world, in China, Southeast Asia and Latin America.
In Australia, Seek controls 85 percent of the online recruitment market, with 173,000 job listings and average monthly traffic of 19.2 million visitors; nearest competing job board Indeed, the aggregator owned by Japan-based Recruit Holdings, has 106,000 listings and average monthly traffic of 9.3 million visitors.
But there are many smaller websites where accounting jobs can be found.
IT’S NEVER REALLY a good idea to work for new client or potential new clients for free, particularly if you’re an established business. But it’s also difficult getting a client to feel comfortable that you’ll do a good job for them, when they don’t know you from the proverbial bar of soap.
Membership with an industry association, even if a registered BAS agent, is not compulsory and you don’t have to rely on them as a source for obtaining your requisite CPD points.
In the past, most industry associations would refer BAS agents to a number of partner training organisations that provided relevant training courses. However, industry associations, such as the ICB, have increasingly started running their own training courses, both online and in-person.
CPA’s conflict of interest
Although the TPB provides guidelines for the types of training courses that will be accepted as evidence of CPD, industry associations still possess a considerable amount of oversight. If a BAS agent is a member of an industry association, the TPB doesn’t question their CPD training because it’s supposedly been approved by the industry association.
Recently, questions have been raised about CPA Australia’s potential conflict of interest as the organisation also operates a financial planning business, CPA Advice, as an affiliate of the industry body.
But new rules that will come into effect in 2024 stipulate that to provide financial advice, you must be a member of a monitoring body or professional association (such as CPA Australia), but that the professional association cannot be an Australian Financial Services licensee or an affiliate of a licensee.
Is providing and overseeing CPD training a conflict?
EzyLearn, until very recently, used to be an ICB partner. When the ICB started offering their own training courses, their promotion of partner training providers, like EzyLearn, reduced considerably in favour of promoting their own training courses and seminars.
In other words, in many ways, the ICB started competing with their partner organisations. Our return on investment (ROI) had never been great anyway, so EzyLearn decided to cancel our corporate sponsorship as it seemed the ICB had a conflict of interest. Although the TPB may not see it that way.
What about the Business Support Program?
For $396 a year, the ICB also offers businesses that do not have a bookkeeper doing their books, access to training materials and information on how they can manage their own bookkeeping on their own without a bookkeeper.
That’s despite charging BAS agents and bookkeepers as much as $480 annually in membership fees, which they promise will help them to get clients — and the sponsorship fees to partner training providers that provide the same or similar services.
Membership with an industry association is not compulsory
Joining an industry association can be incredibly useful, but membership is not compulsory. And as industry associations try to find new ways to extract revenue from the industry — through paid memberships, sponsorships, training courses and even undercutting their members and sponsors by directly offering services which help businesses do their own bookkeeping — they stop being a critical resource for professional bookkeepers and BAS agents working in the industry.
Instead, bookkeepers and BAS agents can complete their CPD training anywhere. For $175 a year (or $15 per month), EzyLearn offers a membership called the Bookkeeping Academy, which gives members access to a complete library of content, including instructional videos, on how to carry out common bookkeeping tasks in MYOB, QuickBooks and Xero. Visit the Bookkeeping Academy website for more information.
NOT SO LONG AGO, bookkeepers and accountants only had to learn to work with one accounting program. That was back when MYOB, the market leader, had a strangle-hold on the industry, and though a few alternatives – Reckon, Quickbooks – tried to squeeze out a space for themselves, MYOB was too embedded in the accounting industry.
A “recognised employer” is an organisation that’s partnered with an industry association and made a commitment to the professional development of their employees. The CPA, for example, says on its website that becoming a recognised employer will help firms attract top talent and provide training to their staff.
A mutually beneficial relationship
Organisations partner with industry associations to become recognised employers because it gives them access to the association’s members, the majority of which are often looking for work.
In turn, the organisation is attractive to members because it has the association’s endorsement. And the industry association usually gives its recognised employer partners access to discounted training for their staff.
Employer recognised
Because of this relationship between organisations and industry associations, members will often hear or see the term “employer recognised” used by their industry association. It’s basically the inverse of “recognised employer,” and it’s not unique to industry associations.
EzyLearn is an employer recognised training organisation, because we are the online training organisation of choice for many well known organisations in the accounting, bookkeeping, finance and related industries. (Plus some unrelated industries too!)
EzyLearn training at small, large and public sector firms
This gives students and employers the flexibility to choose when training will take place, rather than being restricted to a specific time and place, as occurs with face-to-face training.
It also means, we’re able to deliver lots of different courses, simply by making them available to each organisation and their staff, who can then study multiple courses successively or concurrently. This would prove quite difficult to organise if training was being delivered in person.
EzyLearn is the preferred choice for dozens of companies because our courses are structured to let students choose when to study and the pace at which they’ll complete the coursework. Students can jump back and forth between the modules, studying the most relevant portions first before going on to complete the rest of the course.
Thousands of students study with EzyLearn to find work
Besides working with employers to help maintain their employees’ professional development, EzyLearn is also the training organisation of choice for thousands of students who wanted to refresh their skills to find work. Nearly all of those students went on to find employment, while many others either started their own businesses or added to their skills while already running a business. Our website has an abundance of testimonials you can view which show how people of all ages, from all backgrounds, have used the EzyLearn online training courses as a springboard to find work, start their own businesses, refresh their training and many other applications.
For students looking to start their own bookkeeping business, it is worthwhile taking a look at EzyLearn’s partnership with National Bookkeeping. Individuals who join National Bookkeeping as a bookkeeper receive help starting their own business — through lead generation, marketing and promotion — in addition to software and digital marketing training to ensure their business’s longevity in the marketplace.
An industry association membership may be just what you need
Joining an industry association can help towards things like CPD points, but it pays to make sure you’re getting market rate for any courses and that the ongoing fees are of benefit to you.
IF YOU LIKE BOOKKEEPING, but you’d like to provide additional services to your clients, the next step is to become a BAS agent. BAS agents provide businesses with a range of services, including the lodgement of business activity statements, registering and advice on all GST matters, assistance with PAYG, and a number of other services.
Association of Accounting Technicians — affiliate members must have Certificate IV in Financial Services or at least two years experience and no formal qualifications; membership fees: $295 for three months ($1,180 per year).
Australian Bookkeepers Network — no requirements to join; membership fees: $462 annually.
Institute of Certified Bookkeepers — Affiliate members must have Certificate IV in Financial Services or complete an ICB assessment; membership fees: $264 annually. (After achieving 12 months experience Affiliates can become Associate members; membership fees for contractors $432 annually.)
Other industry associations BAS agents can join, include:
Association of Chartered Certified Accountants ANZ
Chartered Accountants ANZ
CPA Australia
Institute of Public Accountants
New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants (NZICA)
Many associations run their own webinars and in-person seminars (for an additional fee), which count towards your CPD hours. (BAS agents must complete 45 hours of CPD over a three year period.) Some of them will help you with the running of your own bookkeeping business, while others will take you through new trends in bookkeeping (single touch payroll) or changes to the Act and relevant legislation.
Each time you complete a webinar or some other form of approved CPD training, it’ll be counted towards your CPD hours. You can also complete CPD training through an accredited training organisation. (Check with your industry organisation to see which training institutions you can learn with.)
Choosing an industry association
Not all industry associations are the same. Some are geared more towards the accounting industry (CPA, Chartered Accountants ANZ, etcetera) and accountants; others cater specifically to bookkeepers. Even within the group of associations that cater only to bookkeepers, some provide a range of services (updates on the industry, CPD training), while others offer very little (discounts on professional indemnity, a newsletter).
As the old saying goes, you get what you pay for. If you want to pay very little, you’ll get very little in return from your industry association. But that doesn’t mean you need to spend a lot either. Have a look at a few of the associations we’ve listed above, and see which one suits you best.
The Association of Accounting Technicians offers affiliate memberships, which provides affiliates with access to a number of discounted fees on training courses to help them develop their skills and progress to a “member” level membership — and then register as a BAS agent with the TPB at the reduced 1,000 hours of experience concession.
Join the Bookkeeping Academy for CPD Points
Industry Associations can offer discounts on professional indemnity insurance and bookkeeping journals and publications. And they offer a range of online webinars to help members get their CPD hours up but you just have to demonstrate continuing education to keep you your CPD requirements.
EzyLearn’s online training courses are accredited by BAS agents, accountants and bookkeepers — those we deem to be the industry’s “high water mark” for bookkeeping work. These people are the highest qualified individuals operating in the accounting and bookkeeping space. If they believe the content of our courses is genuinely of high quality and relevant to the bookkeeping world, then this is the accreditation that should give our students peace of mind.
I found the EzyLearn Xero course great — a comprehensive step-by-step learning tool to add to my resume and a new tool to use in my Bookkeeping Practice.”
— Patricia Darby Registered BAS Agent and Bookkeeper, High Quality Bookkeeping
WE HAVE TALKED about lifelong learning in a previous post; lifelong learning being the concept of learning as an ongoing exercise that individuals should undertake throughout their lifetimes, in order to remain productive and engaged members of society. In other words, learning never stops.
Lifelong learning is particularly important in the workplace, where the rates of technological advancement threaten to wipe out entire professions and replace them with new ones. We’ve talked about Xero’s newly announced lifelong learning platform, which launched in November 2017, in partnership with Swinburne University (for Australia and New Zealand). A full global roll out is expected in 2018.
We are also thrilled to announce our new Lifelong Learning Hub for all EzyLearn students to access. It is part of our Additions and Updates policy and all students who have signed up for Lifetime Access since 2013, and all students within their 12-month access period, can access the following:
Xero’s Lifelong Learning Platform is clever, but it’s a misnomer since “lifelong learning”, as a concept, doesn’t relate to a single pursuit (accounting or finance), but rather an individual’s entire attitude toward learning and how they learn.
Xero’s lifelong learning platform offers just one pillar (learning to do) of lifelong learning, not a framework to engaging in lifelong learning, the concept.
Lifetime Access is what it says it is
Have you ever gone to re-watch a movie or TV show on Netflix and discovered that it’s been removed from the Netflix library to make way for other titles? Good thing, you’ve seen it already.
The same happens at educational institutions that have to update or make way for a new course, and so they purge their content and course offerings. (Just try and find a TAFE that teaches shorthand nowadays, even though it remains a sought-after skill in a lot of professions.)
If you’ve already taken a now-deleted course, the good news is that you’ve learned those skills already. The bad news is that you can’t go back and brush up on them. The ever worse news is that you have to start a new course from scratch if you want to build on your existing skills with the update content.
That’s where EzyLearn’s Lifetime Access training courses are different. When you enrol in a training course with lifetime access, you have access to every version of that training course for life. When we update our course content, we continue to provide you with access to previous content (which includes older versions of the software), so you can go back and refresh your skills.
Lifetime Access for CPD points
As Continuing Professional Development (CPD) is a requirement for most professions today, but particularly for bookkeepers and BAS agents, the Bookkeeping Academy’s training courses with lifetime access are also recognised by the ICB, so you get your CPD points and access to all of our course content for as long as you need it — for one, low price.
Help us provide better courses
If you join the EzyLearn Beta Club, you get access to our courses that are still in development, giving you the opportunity to learn new skills before other students, and provide feedback on the types of exercises and scenarios you’d like to see in our courses.
Our Beta Club courses are important to us because we get to hone our course content based on feedback from students while the courses are still in development. This saves us lots of time, particularly if the feedback from students means we take the course in a substantially different direction.
It also benefits our students and partners who get the content before it’s officially launched, and can request content that covers areas of business relevant to them and their clients. This helps students and partners stay ahead of industry trends, and become experts before the courses are officially rolled out.
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EzyLearn already has a number of training courses currently in beta and available to our Beta Club members. Visit our website for more information on Lifetime Access training courses and our Beta Club.
Video, Video, Video. Everyone tells me you need to do it
I’M NO STRANGER TO NETWORKING, no stranger to making speeches, doing presentations and so forth. But creating a video is still NERVE WRACKING!
We all have issues about how we look, how we sound, how well we present ourselves and I went through all of these emotions before creating this video — SO I hope you like it.
It’s only short and covers all the topics I was hoping to convey and I’d love to hear your feedback. It’s so easy to create videos and publish them on your own website these days and we show you how to do this in our WordPress courses.
EzyLearn is a small business and we’ve been teaching students how to use software to:
find a job
do better at their current job and
start and manage their own business
And,we’ve been doing it for over 20 years.
When we created the training courses for MYOB in the late 1990’s I decided that we, as a company, need to create our own training materials so that we could define the learning stories that take students from epiphany to epiphany — that is one of the most rewarding aspects of training.
I was fortunate enough to work with some very experienced MYOB Certified Consultants who helped deliver and influence the contents of our MYOB bookkeeping course training materials. Since those days we have added and added, and refined content, based on feedback from student feedback.
We’ve also worked with registered BAS agents, accountants and corporate accounting staff to continue to add to and refine our courses so we can keep providing the BEST VALUE FOR MONEY COURSES in Xero & MYOB.
Working with the Best People
Having a good track record, great training courses and satisfied students is a great reward for running EzyLearn, but the best part — and the part that I could not do without — is the team of people I’m fortunate enough to work with, and part of this message is to thank YOU for helping me grow and manage the EzyLearn experience. Those people are:
Ange: For doing the research, putting new technology into perspective and writing many of the words that people read in our blogs and other training content over the last 6 years
Iroshini: For managing the technical end of our multiple Learning Management Systems
Brian: For helping to automate our Enrolment Voucher System that enables thousands of students to access low cost courses automatically
Tracey: For providing the last word in what is correct and incorrect in regards to anything BAS-related
Helen: For helping to co-ordinate the mammoth task of creating, version control and design of training materials
Luke: For consistently great customer service so that every student can get through their courses quickly and efficiently and new students understand all the information on our websites
Richard: For making sure that all of our procedures are followed meticulously and changed where needed
Rosie: For making sure that our accounts are something that I don’t need to worry too much about
Yvette: For coordinating and editing content and helping with marketing for all various aspects of the business
Linus: For the deep level coding and hosting advice you have provided when we need it
Plus there are the various smaller tasks which our international workers and virtual assistants have helped with as well, so thanks too to you all!
We’re going DEEP in 2018
As a training course content creator EzyLearn focuses on our niche markets of
accounting
office administration
marketing
and in 2018 we’re going to give existing students more (watch out for an announcement about our LIFELONG Learning Platform — which will include MYOB and QuickBooks courses, not just Xero).
We’ve also beefed up the success programs for employees working through their careers and the sales success program to help our students upskill and reskill to earn more in 2018.
I’ve spent a lot of time learning more about property investment, renovation and the real estate industry and we’ll have some new courses in 2018 to help you improve your retirement and wealth by investing in property. Stay tuned for that!
Do you have the skills needed to be the perfect office manager, administrative or executive assistant?
I WAS BROWSING THROUGH my contacts on LinkedIn and found an advertisement by a company that was looking to hire people.
They were in the AI (Artificial Intelligence) space and their headquarters were in Europe.
However, the ad looked like it could be for any company including trades, professional services etc.
Here’s what the ad contained:
Executive Assistant / Office Manager
Overview
The Executive Assistant / Office Manager will be primarily responsible for helping to keep everyone (and everything) working at peak performance. We’re a growing company, and there will be new and interesting challenges every day. Ideal candidates are curious and interested in learning more about what we do, and always interested in learning new skills and taking on new challenges.
Tasks
Manage all aspects of office administration
Coordinate team schedules and events
Manage executive schedules
Handle payment of invoices and associated bookkeeping
Order supplies and equipment
Arrange travel
Skills
Required
Excellent verbal and written English communication skills
Strong organizational and time management skills
Ability to work with minimum supervision, prioritizing work as needed
Strong knowledge of office applications, including Word, Powerpoint, and Excel
The training you need
Apart from the soft skills like good time management, communications, speaking and writing the software skills you can learn to apply for this job are:
Why I’m sharing this ad is that I reckon it encapsulates “the perfect” administrative or executive assistant, or office manager. What I mean is that anybody possessing all the skills and capabilities listed above would be well qualified for almost any job in this area — for pretty much any type of company.
And they wouldn’t be limited to any particular industry either. Any intelligent person who is a quick learner would be able to pick up the nuances for various different industries and apply their skills as necessary.
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Xero is a great bookkeeping program for tradies who are on the go and using their phones (or a tablet) all the time. From receipts scanning to creating quotes and invoices, receiving payments and keeping track of project costs.
bookkeepercourse.com.au/produ…
