Let's face it, training for both accounting and corporate finance professionals is tough and expensive, and most companies don't do a good job of it. Why? Well, we can start with the fact that most companies simply have the wrong tools in place. 

Most companies have very few good options for their Finance and Accounting professionals when it comes to professional development. Every mid or large sized company has its broad-based learning management system, but those are built to provide everything to everyone. In other words, they generally fail at providing highly specific training to those who need that highly specific training. And they certainly have virtually no course catalog that speaks to the needs of the "Office of the CFO" and all of its many sub-functions, such as finance, accounting, tax, treasury, internal audit, FinOps (payables, receivables, etc.) and more. 

Given that there are no internal training systems that work for Finance and Accounting organizations, most corporate employees on these teams are forced to go outside to find their training. This means live conferences and seminars, or live, consultant-led training. All of these flavors of live training are expensive, inconvenient, and largely un-targeted, with the exception of the consultant-led training, which is at least semi-targeted. Real talk: live conferences and seminars are based on someone else's learning agenda, not your employees'. In fact, those conferences are based largely upon speaker and venue availability, and not much else beyond loose themes. This is expensive and untargeted training - the worst of both worlds! You can do better.

To start, you really want to get your arms around where your employees are currently finding their training in these organizations, assess those training resources for overall efficacy as well as return on investment, and ask yourself whether you are getting the most for your money, or even getting the training your people really need at all.

From that point you can reassess your finance and accounting training needs based on direct user input. What we at Illumeo have found, serving tens of thousands of professionals in these functional areas, is that most people want the precise training they need for their job, from great instructors, they want it instantly (because that’s when they need it), and they wanted at a very low cost for themselves or for their companies.

A new generation of on-demand training platforms is actually able to deliver this now, whereas it was never possible in the past. What's needed is online, on-demand training platforms with massive, high quality content libraries that cover the entire finance, accounting and related organizations from top to bottom, including things like assessment, development plans, CPE and compliance monitoring. Not too much to ask. 

This is, in fact, what Illumeo was built for. Illumeo was built by a multi-decade corporate finance and accounting leader who, regardless of company size, was never able to find a satisfactory learning platform that provided the on-demand learning delivered instantly that these employees needs.

The white paper entitled "4 Ways to Save Money and Do Better on Training and CPE for Accounting and Corporate Finance Professionals" addresses the desire to understand  where and how your organization is spending money on training currently, plus how effectively, and provides a number of highly practical alternatives to do better for less. It's actually easy to do once you open your eyes up to options beyond the "traditional" training routes for finance and accounting. This white paper makes a quick and clear case for alternatives that you can implement at virtually any company, quickly, and save significant training spend while simultaneously and significantly improving the training results. 

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John Kogan is the co-founder and CEO of Illumeo. Prior to Illumeo he spent over two decades building and running companies as CFO or CEO, and in a variety of corporate finance and accounting roles at large, publicly-traded companies.