[ife12]

Can any one advise how relevant CMA will be to me as an engineer. I work as a cost control engineer for an oil and gas construction firm . I do a lot of cost accounting, forecasting and EVM. I feel I need more accounting knowledge to enhance my skills and the CMA seems to be the ideal platform.

I look forward to your feedback.

[Anonymous]

Are you wanting to study from the materials for the CMA to learn more, or are you wanting to become certified as a CMA?

For the first, the CMA materials may be a good guideline, but it's likely that they'll anticipate more academic knowledge of accounting than you currently have. It sounds like you have more hands-on knowledge, which is very useful for doing the actual work, but may not give you the academic basis the CMA expects. However, if you are aware of this and willing to work around it, I think you could get some more intro-level accounting textbooks and use them to supplement. I would guess that your specific weak points would be the financial accounting side of things, so a textbook for an Intro to Accounting (ACCT1001 or similar) course would be a good starting point. I'm sure you can learn all the information from the CMA books, but since they'll be talking in academic-accounting-lingo/style, you might just need a bit more basis in that.

For the second. before going through the effort of taking the exams etc., I would suggest seeing if your experience would qualify under the IMA's requirements for the CMA. Their requirements are somewhat specific, so I am concerned that they wouldn't count your experience. This document: https://www.imanet.org/docs/default-source/cma-lib/cma_handbook_2016.pdf?sfvrsn=8 includes the experience requirement, but you could contact IMA for further clarification.

[ife12]

Thanks Lilla for your comments.
I actually want to become certified because that would give me the appetite to read extensively.
That said, I believe I can pass the exams even though it's not clear to me how the certification would blend with my engineering background.
I had recently forwarded my CV to IMA to review my experience towards the award of the certification and I await their feedback.

[Anonymous]

Sounds like you're way ahead of me on the experience piece of things – good. 🙂 I'd hate to see anyone go through the exams and then find out they couldn't get the certification. 😐

I'm not sure how the CMA would blend with being an engineer, though, so can't really help you on that piece…but if you decide to seek the certification, I'll be interested to see your journey progress!

[Anonymous]

I think CMA is most relevant for anyone who is closer to business data than the accounting people .. Particularly Part 1 of CMA is a lot of cost control, budgeting and forecasting and I think numbers make more sense to engineers and production managers.

I would rate CMA as the most useful degree for an engineer among any of the professional certifications, probably another would be CISA (which is a popular choice for engineers in IT)

[ife12]

Chevycar, I appreciate your comments. Thanks.

[Author]

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