There are several trends that will have a tremendous impact on my career path. My goal was to learn as much as I could about accounting by pursuing the Certificate program. What I have realized is with AI the landscape has changed.

For example, with AI, one could now handle and process large amounts of data such as various 10K reports to help identify trends and patterns within a company and/or specific industry.

This will help speed up analysis of the date but also allow the accounting personnel with the expertise to add context to the data based on the interpretation of it.

Finally, once you have this huge repository of information at your fingertips that's already been analyzed you can begin to manipulate it by querying the data using various prompts.

This lends itself to accounting staff leaning more into Data Analytics, which they often do when using Pivot Tables but on a deeper level with more granular control.

While my initial goal is still the same, I have realized that Data Analytics is more of an area I will pursue as I love the problem-solving aspect of digging through data to find patterns that would need to be analyzed and interpreted to gain meaning.

I will be learning Power BI and Tableau in the next month or two so I can better understand how to retrieve, clean, and manipulate data to create reports and dashboards to help companies to make better decisions.

This was a very challenging class for me but I appreciate Accountants more now than I ever have. Looking forward to my next class on Taxation. Should be fun!

 In business, as in life, changes are constant. From investigating unprecedented business disruptors to adapting to new operational programs. In accounting, one trend that I see that it can impact my career path as an accountant is technology and automation. I believe that this trend can do positive but also a negative impact. Accounting tasks are some of the most exciting developments in the accounting industry, however, while there are many accounting functions that can be automated, there is a lack of understanding of the technologies and a lack of resources to implement them. Another negative impact about technology is with more and more consumers and businesses using accounting software programs, CPA firms will need to use sophisticated technology in different ways to help their clients, otherwise, everything will have to go "remote" and more clients will end up doing their tax transactions using different software and we, as CPA's will be less used.

Another trend that I find impactful about my career path is Data security. Data breaches tend to become more common throughout the years, and it is unfortunate to say, but fraudster's processes are getting easier on them. With the technology trend mentioned above, data breaches are also a bigger risk than ever, and finance departments are one of the leading targets. The breaches can lead to identity theft, or the stealing of personal data and credit card information, and spoofing, which is when an email is disguised to appear to come from a known and trustworthy source.

This class has allowed me to have a closer look at a different aspect of accounting. In my mind, I used to relate accounting automatically with "tax returns", but this class let me experience what is above tax returns, and that there is a way to obtain something with right and proper tools and calculations. Resources are available for us to do our best at what we want to succeed in a career path that we are passionate about.

Based on scenerio 1 & 2 above

Discuss whether you agree with the impacts the accounting trends will have on your peer's career path. Why or why not?

• If you do not agree, provide at least one constructive suggestion as to why it may not impact their career path.