Sharing my life experiences including the ACA qualification
If you have read my difficulty ranking of all 15 ACA exams with statistics, you will be aware that I found ACA Corporate Reporting (CR) to be the hardest ACA exam. I will talk you through exactly how much time I spent revising for this exam in this article. Spoiler alert, it was quite a …
The ACA qualification has much more to it than the 15 exams alone and there are in fact many different routes to becoming ACA qualified. The route available through my graduate scheme in audit at a Big Four firm was the Level 7 Apprenticeship. This seems to be becoming a more popular route across UK …
ACA Financial Management (FM) is an exam that falls into the ICAEW ACA Professional Level. I must say, this was probably one of my favourite ACA exams due to the exam structure and objective nature. More details can be found on the structure in this Professional Level exam breakdown although I will recap this below. …
If you are reading this, you are likely to either be at the dreaded moment where your Business Planning: Taxation (BPT) exam is approaching or you are intrigued about the ACA myth itself. Before you read on, just know that I have been in your position in 2019. It is an unsettling time and initially …
Besides being asked how difficult the ACA exams are, I would rank this as the second most common question I am asked. There are many different ways to sit the ACA examinations. I have touched on this in my earlier blog posts in terms of the order of exams, which sittings are available for which …
After months of revising having put your heart and soul into doing evvvverything you could to pass an exam, the exam still goes badly. It went so badly that you wish you barely revised at all considering it felt as though it did not make much of a difference anyway. The exam was nothing like …
What was my first impression of the ICAEW Case Study? Weird. This exam is completely different to the 14 ACA exams prior which actually have new content to learn. The ICAEW Case Study was completely unknown to me until I came to study for this exam. It was not really an exam that was spoken …
I would say I have sat a LOT of exams in my 25 years, including more recently the 15 ACA exams. With every exam comes exam stress to some extent. To make matters worse, there was even the added pressure with the ACA exams that my job could be on the line if I performed …
The ICAEW ACA Ethics Learning Programme is a key requirement to becoming ACA qualified. Ethics is constantly drummed into you throughout your ACA studies. This is done through examining ethics within each ACA exam and through the Ethics and Professional Scepticism tab of the training file. This is an element of the ACA qualification that …
Before reading, please note that this is an extremely subjective blog. What I find difficult another person may not and vice versa. Find the details of my academic background here if interested (no prior accounting experience). Therefore, this is my personal opinion on how hard the ICAEW ACA exams are. I will also include ICAEW …
The final part to the 15 ACA exams breakdown is the three ACA Advanced Level exams. These consist of the three exams outlined below. The Case Study exam as mentioned in Part 1 has to be sat last of all the exams. The three Advanced Level exams can be sat in one exam sitting (during …
Now you have entered into the ACA Professional Level exams, multiple choice questions are a thing of the past. These exams are a HUGE step up from Certificate exams. To put yourself in the best position for these ACA exams ensure you have grasped the basic understanding from Certificate Level. Much of the content will …
As mentioned in ‘All Important ACA: What? Why? How to Qualify?’, there are 15 ACA exams. These 15 exams can be broken down into three levels: Certificate Level – six exams Professional Level – six exams Advanced Level – three exams This blog post focuses on the ACA Certificate Level exams. In order to make …
What is the ACA? The ACA, different to ACCA, stands for Associate Chartered Accountant (ACA). It is a professional qualification (similar to a masters), which for me came as part of my graduate scheme in audit. However, this qualification is also part of many other graduate schemes within the financial sector. The ACA covers a …