YES i heard the papers in NTU is also harder than CA questions.
Thats why there is a drop in ppl taking SCAQ, therefore they making more exemptions to attract people.

I'm from NTU btw, and I've talked to a few people in NTU regarding whether they will take CA SG. Quite a lot of them don't want. Few of them is ok coz big4 is sponsoring it. One of the top students said that he is crazy if he takes CA SG.

NTU keep hosting these accounting discussions but it leads to nowhere. They will keep asking how to make accounting industry more attractive. They knew the answer but keep asking the same qns, hoping that we will change our answers. LOL. Dream on. With regards to the Accountancy industry, I am more interested in what detailed actions they have come up with from the prior discussion rather than keep asking the same old qns.

I'm also curious why school teaches us on the importance of talent retention when it is not even applicable to big4? A little contradiction here right? Those boomers in ISCA, SAC, MOF should really go and take HR courses and understand how to motivate employees / attract and retain talents.


With the new generation coming into the workforce, things are getting different. I personally feel that to shape the Accountancy industry, they need to change their fixated beliefs and mindset.

I agree that internships do help students to understand more accounting roles. I have heard from some friends going into big4 and was afraid of doing audit again. Perhaps more can be done in this area. However, I feel no action will be carried out.

The discussion also asked about the top 3 areas to embark on accountancy. I believe everyone already knows: Pay, work life balance and workload. This is just simple HR things, they keep asking the same questions making me feel that they are stupid to understand. I doubt nothing will change to improve in either of these areas too.

The discussion also keep focusing on IT audit and sustainability. With the new emerging IT audit and sustainability, it will add more workload. From my view, companies are unwilling to spend on segregating the departments (because it will be a cost centre). Most likely they will hire few internal auditors to cover IT audit and sustainability.

In addition, I do agree that new areas such as IT audit, IT analytics and sustainability are becoming more “important”. However, from what I know is that companies are unwilling to hire accountancy students in IT audit, IT analytics and sustainability.

For in-house IT audit, those companies want talents from computer science or information technology. Almost all of them have these requirement. For big4 IT audit, what they are doing are not of value adding. They are auditing businesses IT system when they don’t even know how to use the IT system.

As for IT analytics, companies are hiring those from business analytics major. I think accountancy graduates don’t stand a chance either.

The recent pay increments in audit associate were merely covering the inflation for the past 5 years. The news coverage on the pay was highly overrated.

Sufficiency of education to prepare workforce is sufficient but not good enough. I went to the recent career fair, some jobs said that they are open to fresh graduates, yet the description said preferred 2 years' experiences. Applied for it and get no replies at all.

In school, we were taught about the importance of talent retention. But none of these were applicable in big4. I secretly hope that all big4 people terminate their jobs at the same time, to make big4 realise the importance of HR management and talent retention programmes. Worst still, ISCA and SAC personnel are hosting talks without concrete action plans. They even try to brain wash students to join big4, saying that increment is high and will pay off if we stay for long period. Ew.