President'sInterview
KEVIN BRAGG FMAAT
Now is the time to enhance your employability
New AAT president Kevin Bragg FMAAT has embraced change throughout his career, and is keen to see AAT members harness it to ensure their continued employability
Kevin Bragg FMAAT is putting employability at the centre of his tenure as AAT president. Amid major shifts in technology and considerations around the role of accountants, he is clear that AAT members are well-placed to thrive in the evolving landscape.
“AAT members have real-world experience,” Bragg explains. “By going through apprenticeships or going through our training, it means members are going to be in work environments from the off and benefitting from regular CPD learning, and there’s no substitute for that.”
Adaptation is an ongoing process
Bragg himself began his career as an AAT apprentice with a manufacturing business, benefitting from rotating through each department to get a complete view of the how the company functioned.
Staying in the manufacturing space, he went on to move up through the ranks, becoming a finance director and also becoming heavily involved in management buyouts, mergers, acquisitions and disposals.
“I learned how to do management buyouts. As part of a project for my MBA, my employer had a subsidiary that was making remould tyres that it didn’t know what to do with. Along with two other colleagues, we did a management buyout of the subsidiary, which gave a great conclusion to my MBA case study! I then later learned how to sell a company, as we sold out to the largest remould tyre manufacturer in the UK at the time.
“Change has been with us all through my career and through my life, so the fact we’re seeing it now is no different,” Bragg notes. “We’ve had Covid, which has changed working practices, and we’ve also got technology changing things. People may worry it changes everything — it doesn’t. What it does it give us different tools to do thew jobs we need to do.”
AI, in particular, is a case in point for Bragg. While it is advancing at a remarkable rate, it is not a force he regards as a threat to accountants, or AAT members in particular. Rather, he says, it is a “tool to add to their kit”.
“Change has been with us all through my career and through my life, so the fact we’re seeing it now is no different.”
Emphasis on employability
An additional point of differentiation that AAT members have, Bragg points out, is their “real world experience”.
Given members often train on-the-job, and gain experience through practical means, “you cannot avoid actually building up your own understanding of business”.
“You have that day-to-day understanding of commerce and industry, which people coming out of university and other more academic routes simply don’t have,” he notes. “There’s a reason why in trades such as plumbing, they operate a buddy system that allows new recruits to learn just by watching and settling into the day-to-day working routine. Our people who go through our training are going to be in the environment and seeing how their businesses function, and that gives them a real edge in terms of being attractive to employers.”
Of course, Bragg is aware that major change is underway in the integration of AI into the working world, as well as an increasing emphasis on environmental, social and governance (ESG) activities and reporting.
“Our members will be using AI as a tool as they’re going to be interrogating information and putting it into reports. AI covers a lot of things, some of which we’re already using, and it’s another tool in the box.
“If members aren’t already, they are going to have to start thinking about ESG. There are standards being introduced and investors are pushing very hard for more information on ESG, so they can target their investments in entities which are meeting their requirements. That won’t go away any time soon, so it’s important to be across it.”
OPPORTUNITIES
AAT opens doors
Bragg is also keen to impress upon members the opportunities presented by their membership.
“If you can demonstrate that you’re a member of an organisation, what that does is differentiate you from other people,” he says. “Having your AAT qualification behind you opens doors.”
In particular, he is keen to highlight the access the AAT qualification route provides into the accounting profession, which he notes carries with it the potential for “higher grade employability”.
“If you have good qualifications such as AAT’s, and you maintain it well with CPD, your salary scale is on a different level,” he adds.
