Accounting Guest Lecture: Accountants’ career – past, present, and future

Guest speaker: Mr. Law Cho Wa, Richard 

On Tuesday, December 22nd, 2020, the students of the managerial accounting class welcome Mr. Law Cho Wa (Richard) to have a guest speech with the topic “Accountants’ career – past, present, and future”.

Mr. Law is a professional accountant, a corporate governance professional, and a company secretary from Hong Kong. With more than 30 years of working experience in accounting and corporate governance, Mr. Law held several sizable-listed companies in Hong Kong. Besides, He was also an independent director of a Hong Kong listed company for six years. He was extensively involved in two IPOs (Application for listing), three privatization exercises, and other corporate actions during his career.  Mr. Law immigrated to Taiwan in 2018 and has been studying Ph.D. in Business Administration at Sun Yat-sen University since 2019 

During his career, he is a member of some professional associations and public committees such as the Education Committee of the Hong Kong Institute of Chartered Secretaries (since 2017, the Sustainability Committee of the Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants (since 2014).

With a very clear categorization of accountants’ career into three stages, including the periods from 1987 to 2010, from 2011 to 2020, and from 2021 and onwards, Mr. Law provides an overview of career development in accounting field along with the major incidents happened in the past three decades such as the Black Monday in 1987. Asian Financial crisis in 1997, and COVID-19 pandemic in 2019-2020. Besides, he also presents the definition of accountants from different perspectives with the main majors and responsibilities over time. 

With his extensive knowledge and experience, Mr. Law helps students understand how to acquire the knowledge of accounting to become an accountant. There are some potential sources, including Universities Bachelor, Technical/Vocational Colleges, Self-study. More particularly, he emphasizes the primary role of self-study in this career. He also mentioned key developments impacting accountants nowadays. From the main functions of an accountant, which consist of Accounting, Audit, Taxation, Finance, Corporate Governance & Company Secretarial, Mr. Law analyzed the variance of these functions over time in the link with the substantial events happening and impacting the world economy. 

After the speech, students can understand how the accounting career has developed over the past decades and imagine how it changes in the future. From the managerial perspective, the role of accounting and its relationship with other functions in an organization are also clarified.