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Maryland Approves 10-Minute CPE, State CPA Society Prepares for the Future of Learning

The Maryland State Board of Public Accountancy voted unanimously on Tuesday to adopt the final CPE regulations for "nano learning," also known as 10-minute CPE increments. The regulations will be in effect by March 31, 2015. Maryland joins Ohio in ...

Mar. 04, 2015

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The Maryland State Board of Public Accountancy voted unanimously on Tuesday to adopt the final CPE regulations for “nano learning,” also known as 10-minute CPE increments. The regulations will be in effect by March 31, 2015. Maryland joins Ohio in the official approval of this new format for Continuing Professional Education.

“This is an important first step in moving Maryland toward the ‘future of learning’ for CPAs,”said Tom Hood, CPA,CITP, CGMA, executive director and CEO of hte Maryland Association of CPAs. The “future of learning” is a profession-wide initiative to advance the Continuing Professional Education model started by the AICPA.

“The trend in ‘just-in-time’ learning was clear among major firms and corporations which is why we wanted to move forward on his initiative,” said Maryland CPA Society member Jackie Brown, who participated on the task force.  We worked with the AICPA, NASBA and Ohio in formulating this regulation as an effort to maintain uniformity as these new formats for CPE are addressed.

MACPA believes that learning is the next competitive advantage for CPAs in today’s rapidly changing environment.

“In a period of rapid change and increasing complexity, the winners are going to be those people who can keep their rate of learning greater than the rate of change and greater than their competition or L>C2,” Hood added.

The association will showcase the “future of learning” initiative during an event on May 4 at the Hilton at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. The guest speaker will be best-selling author Dan Burrus, one of the world’s leading futurists on global trends and innovation, who will discuss his latest research on trends and competencies needed for CPAs. Event registration information is available here.

MACPA has worked with Burrus to bring an innovative learning program called the Anticipatory CPA,an  accelerated learning system with rapid application tools to help CPAs develop what Hood says is the key competency needed to be future ready: Anticipation. Burrus has also worked with MACPA’s Business Learning Institute and a customer co-creation group of CPAs, organizations, firms and companies to customize his Anticipatory Organization program for CPAs and Accounting/Finance Professionals.

Five ways MACPA says it is changing up learning:

  1. Social: We have been using Twitter hashtags for several years to supplement learning at conferences (before that it, was Second Life and CPA Island). We are now exploring some more formal ways of capturing and documenting this learning using Badges and the PLIYP (Professional Learning in Your Pocket) nano-learning platform.
  2. Mobile / nano, or “Just When You Need It” learning: Our State Board officially approved 10-minute CPE last year and is now offical as of March 31, 2015. We are also working on a innovative learning platform using Twitter that will track nano or micro learning from Twitter and LinkedIn. 
  3. Cloud: In what we call the four Cs of talent development, the AICPA Navigator allows us to offer Competencies, Career Path, and a Curriculum on a Cloud-based learning platform that allows firms and companies to move their talent development to a strategic and systematic approach.See our on-demand leadership bundle, BLI Express for Leaders 50+ hours of leadership on-demand for $17 per month.
  4. Collaborative: MBSN (Management By Sticky Notes), Conferences.io, and the ThinkTank Collaboration platform are highly engaging ways of increasing learning through involvement.
  5. Competency-based learning: With our Bounce framework (which maps BLI programs to the new CGMA Competency framework). We have always believed in a competency-based approach to learning. In fact, it is where our Business Learning Institute (BLI) came from – the initial research in 1998 from the AICPA Vision Project that identified the top five competencies for CPAs in the future.