8 April 2013

Diploma underway

Signed up with OTEN last month, and so far I've applied for and been granted RPL in seven subjects. This leaves eleven units remaining. Setting myself a steady pace and taking my time. Would be great to complete in twelve months, but I'm not going to push myself.

The unit I'm working on at the moment is Prepare Financial Reports, working from a text by Clarke - Accounting: An introduction to principles and practice. I went with the digital edition since I don't like having a ton of textbooks to dispose of at the end of the course. Unfortunately there's some problems with the text, some of it is illegible, but the publisher has reported they are working on the problem.

I'm backtracking some of the earlier chapters off my reading list, to review the material - since a lot of it is background to this unit, but covered in one of the units I was granted credit for. I actually did a phone interview for that one, completely unexpected and off the cuff. Wasn't too happy with my performance, my interviewer said she thought I was about 90% competent. I felt I knew the material but expressed some of my responses poorly. She passed me but warned me I'd probably need to do this background reading to progress further with the course. So I'm doing it.

Some additional reading will include a couple of web sites I've visited in the past, including AccountingCoach.com which is quite an impressive resource, although US based (which isn't really a huge problem since accounting standards in Australia are based on the International standards).

The job share situation is still going well, although I've adjusted the spread of my hours over four days instead of three. This allows my partner and I to work together one afternoon a week, but it's taking a little getting used to - I really liked having a block of four days off each week. I'm hoping this sacrifice (!) will help improve our communication. I've not been entirely satisfied with our handovers, I would like us both to talk more to each other about our work. We seem to be very similar in the way we work - head down and get stuck into it, rather than talk about it. Just going to have to practice this.