WHY ENGLISH IS IMPORTANT TO MY MAJOR (ACCOUNTING)

Gunadarma University (UG) is where I belong now as a colleger. As a World Class University (just like they claimed it is) it ideally expects majority of its students are good at English, at least simple conversational in English, since English is an international language that every world class university students should be good at. I myself took majoring in Accounting. I am an Indonesian and no speak English natively by the way :P (so feel free to correct the mistakes). But i do realize perfect English as my second language is very important to my major.

WHY ENGLISH IS IMPORTANT TO MY MAJOR (ACCOUNTING)

I’d bet many of you who took the same major didn’t think that it is necessary to learn or perfect English at the beginning, like me. You did may reckon that Accounting is all about numeric, formulas,  addition, subtraction, and other calculations, but that’s it. Well, we were not completely wrong. However, we forgot the important part, that Accounting is a social practice. In actual social practice as an accountant, we need to talk to people. Remember, an accountant will be dealing with a lot of people from various types of business, even the foreign ones. If we able to speak in their native language, English for example, it is easier to communicate with them and our ability to get things across will be improved.

Moreover, if you are working with accounting softwares which are developed in English, you will see how necessary it is to have a good grip of English. It indeed is highly necessary for an accountant to understand chart of accounts, journals and so on in English in order to present a financial report that has tangible quality both for company’s internal and external.  

Martin Quinn, accounting lecturer at Dublin City University, Ireland, in his blog under “Are languages important for accountants?” wrote that a second (or third) language for an accountant is probably a must if you work in a multi-national. ”The August Morgan McKinley Employment Monitor highlighted that employers are looking for part qualified and qualified accountants with a second European language, so knowing a language such as French, German or Spanish could increase your employability dramatically. The most recent report for October showed that the majority of hiring continues to be among multilingual professionals in the accountancy sector” (cited from CPA Ireland’s newsletter—Dec 21st, 2012).

It also applies in Indonesia. Don’t you see? You probably will find that ability to speak English is one of the requirements on every accounting job vacancies. I can say that knowing English as second language is one of foundations of successful accountant. So if one of you reading this are not really good at English, why not learn and perfect it as your second language? :)