BONUS | CMA 50th Anniversary: Attracting the Best and the Brightest

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Full Episode Transcript:
Adam:



Join us in this bonus episode of Count Me In, where IMA brand
storyteller, Margaret Michaels sits down with two noteworthy CMAs
to discuss the 50th anniversary of IMA's globally respected
certification for accounting and finance professionals


Margaret:



In this special Count Me In podcast, celebrating the 50th
anniversary of the Certified Management Accountant or CMA
program, I will be speaking with two CMA exam takers, Denny
Beresford, who earned his CMA in 1972 and made IMA history by
becoming one of IMA's first CMAs, and Tori Heavey, a recent
graduate of the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, who won the
CMA student award for the highest score on the exam in the
June/July, 2020 testing window. Tori also recently won the Elijah
Sales Award for her CPA score. Denny has spent a lifetime working
in accounting and finance. He currently serves as a member of
IMA's Financial Reporting Committee and as the executive in
residence at the JM Toll School of Accounting, Terry College of
Business at University of Georgia. Tori is a recent graduate of
the Master's in Accountancy program at the University of
Tennessee Knoxville, and is currently working as a tax associate
for KPMG.


Margaret:



Thank you Denny and Tori for joining me today. As we talk about
your experience taking the CMA exam. Denny, you have the
distinction of being among the first people to sit for the CMA
exam in 1972. At that time, the CMA exam was administered with
paper and pencil and the field of management accounting was not
widely known. What do you remember about taking the CMA exam? How
did you learn about management accounting? Was it through school
or work experience and what are some of your study methods and
tips?


Denny:



I had been a member of IMA, it was actually the National
Association of Accountants or in earlier years since 1962,
shortly after I graduated from college. And in fact, I'd been
active in my local chapter back in Los Angeles, rising from a
helper on some of the committees to become president of the
chapter shortly before I transferred from Ernst & Ernst's
office in Los Angeles to the national office in Cleveland in
1971. So I was very familiar with what was going on at, at the
organization and the fact that the CMA exam was being developed
over a couple of years before that. And I guess I was generally
familiar with the management accounting profession, having again
been participating in IMA for a number of years being involved
particularly at the local chapter level and then also at the
national level.


Denny:



And also having been an auditor and interacting, of course with
many of my clients for that period of time. And when the exam was
was first offered, I decided that it would be a good thing, first
of all, to support the organization for by taking it. And I
thought it would be something that would help build my self
confidence, you might say, in dealing with, with clients. Since I
was a public accountant, I knew that I had to be able to speak
intelligently to controllers and chief financial officers and
others who were involved in the management accounting profession.
And so I thought that being able to pass an exacting exam like
the CMA would again, give me both self confidence and also a
positive credential that would show that I was on similar footing
to them.


Denny:



What I remember about taking the first exam, I was in Cleveland
in the National Office of Ernst & Ernst, and at that point,
and I don't remember how many different settings there were, but
the closest location that I could, where I could take the exam
was Pittsburgh. So I had to I go there, drive over to Pittsburgh,
which isn't too far from Cleveland. I had to stay overnight. And
the morning of the exam, there was an ice storm in Pittsburgh.
And another fellow and I were both gonna take the exam together
and we had to drive from the hotel to the, I don't remember
exactly the place it was being held, but it was a half hour or so
away, and we could barely make it there because of the streets
were all icy and it was just a terrible weather situation.


Denny:



But and it was in a cavernous location, some sort of a very large
convention location, something like that. And it was large and
very cold. And again I had no idea how to prepare for the exam
because back then there hadn't been any previous exams, had
nothing to to go on in terms of looking at what questions had
been asked in the past. And for the first exam, what the
organization had done was give a list of books that you could
consider studying to prepare you for the exam. I thought that was
kind of a good idea, but not a very good use of my time. I knew
that a couple of the parts of the exam, particularly Generally
Accepted Accounting Principles and some other parts were pretty
much in my wheelhouse and I could do well on those.


Denny:



The other parts I wasn't so sure about, but I felt that trying to
study them by going back and reading textbooks or the like, would
not be a very good use of my time. So my strategy, if you will,
was to try to do well on one or two of the parts, and then of the
other parts that if I didn't do so well the next time when I had
to take them over, I'd at least know what to study for. And as it
turned out, I passed the whole exam the first time and had one of
the 10 highest scores. So that strategy worked out pretty well
and it didn't have to go back and study, but that's as much as I
remember about preparing for the exam, why I took it and exactly
what happened when I was there.


Margaret:



That's great. That's a great story about the ice storm. You
really persevered taking the CMA exam a very rigorous enterprise
indeed. Tori, now that you've heard Denny's experience, how do
you think the way you've taken the exam is different from Denny
and what did you do to prepare for the exam?


Tori:



Yeah, my experience was a little different. I did not have an ice
storm to deal with, but I've kind of grown up through the shift
to digital. I rarely ever used computers for school until I came
to college, really. Freshman year, most of my exams were still on
paper and pencil. And gradually more and more classes switched to
exams on the computer. And this transition really helped me
prepare to take the CMA exam electronically, specifically for the
essay portion. It helped that I'd improved my typing skills
tremendously over the time or the few years I'd started using
computers more and got more used to typing papers online or even
just using different software. I used the Wiley CMA exam question
bank to prepare and study for both parts of the CMA exam. And it
was totally computer based. All of my prep except for my own
notes that I still write on paper and pencil.


Tori:



But seeing the exam simulated during my studying in this way
definitely helped a lot. It familiarized me with the test
software and it made actual exam day a lot less daunting just to
have kind of more familiarity in being used to the situation that
I would be in. Cause sometimes it can be so nerve wracking on the
exam day to go into a testing center. Right now we use Prometric
centers, which I'm not sure if y'all are familiar with those, but
you have to schedule an exam slot online, a few, usually a few
weeks or months in advance. And then the day of you show up and
you are assigned a computer that has like the blockers all around
so that everyone is, it's almost like small cubicles a...