How to Build a Powerhouse Learning Team for Your CPA Firm

Create competitive value by combining practitioners and educators on the same team.

By Michael Ramos and Cate Miller

CPAs bring a diverse range of skills to any business problem. At small firms, partners wear many hats, including management of the learning function. But as firms grow, it soon becomes apparent that one of the firm’s partners – no matter how talented he or she may be – is not functioning at their highest and best use if they have to manage the entire learning function on their own.

Part 3 in a 3-Part Series: Run Training Like a Business

Part 1: 4 Steps to Get More from Your Training Budget

Part 2: How to Manage CPE by the Numbers

Part 3: How to Build a Powerhouse Learning Team

With size comes a diversity of learning needs and management of the learning function becomes more complex. The opportunity cost of having firm partners and managers limit their billable hours to coordinate training begins to outweigh the costs of engaging the help of a learning professional.

Thus is born the need for a learning team.

Posted on February 20, 2015

Michael Ramos

About the Author

Michael Ramos is the principal of Michael Ramos + Associates, a learning consultancy firm that works with CPA firms and organizations that provide products and services to the profession to help them develop and deploy high-impact learning programs. He has over 25 years of experience developing and delivering competency-based professional development programs and is the author of numerous auditing books and guides. He also served as the Director of CPE and Training at the AICPA.

Michael Ramos was an Audit Senior Manager with KPMG. During his nine-year career, he was selected for a two-year assignment in the firm’s National Office where he managed and developed the firm’s staff training programs.

For the past 25 years, Mike has been an author, instructor, and consultant to the accounting profession. He is a nationally recognized speaker and author on technical auditing matters. In 2001, Mike wrote the first definitive guide on implementing Sarbanes-Oxley and then worked with leading accounting firms to devise their consulting methodologies and to provide the training necessary for the firms to launch their SOX practices.

When the Auditing Standards Board developed its suite of standards that defined the risk - based audit, it chose Mike to be the primary author of its authoritative guide to implementing the standards. As an expert in risk-based auditing, Mike worked with firms to revise their audit practices and train their staffs on the new standards and develop the competencies necessary to implement them.

Mike served as the Director of the continuing education business unit of the AICPA. He led the revitalization of the business, and reorganized it to expand its on-line learning product line. After leaving the AICPA, Mike formed Michael Ramos + Associates to leverage his three decades of working with leading accounting firms, his network, and his expertise in continuing education to provide unique solutions to learning and knowledge transfer problems.

Over the years his clients have included Deloitte, McGladrey, CliftonLarsonAllen, Plante Moran, Cherry Bekaert, Dixon Hughes Goodman, Frank Rimerman, BKD, The AICPA, The Center for Audit Quality, Wolters Kluwer, and Sageworks. Mike is also an Operating Advisor to a Chicago-based private equity firm, advising them on corporate and professional education matters.

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