‘If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading’ – Lao Tzu. This quotation opens the book by Rosamund Stone Zander titled Pathways to possibility. It captures the nature of life – the ever-present force of chance and how our relation to ourselves, others and the world determines the meaning of the time we are granted. The latest incarnation of the SAICA mentorship programme is the latest chapter in a story that follows these conventions. While the story looks to the past to understand the present, it is also a look into the future of continuous professional development (CPD) and SAICA’s new approach to competency − appropriately titled ‘Pathways to Relevance.
Pathways to relevance
As the narrator of this story, I think it is fair to state upfront that I am a participant in the SAICA mentorship programme. As a CA(SA) who is also a postgraduate student of journalism and media, it seems the ethical thing to do. It also allows me to perform a Gordhanian connecting of the dots between some significant aspects of the post-qualification journey of a 21st-century chartered accountant.
In 2020, the journey includes a new approach to assessing competency and engaging in CPD efforts to close knowledge gaps. The new CA2025 post-qualification competency framework invites us to join ‘Pathways to Relevance’ by which we are able to ‘upskill and reskill’ as required in a knowledge-worker age which requires us to gain competency in new and complex areas. It provides a map of 10 possible career paths which detail the competencies required of CAs working in either entry, mid or senior management levels. As someone who has been reskilling into the world of breaking news, I accepted an early 2020 e-mail invitation from SAICA to join a three-month online pilot programme that focuses on assessing one’s unique learning gaps. It provides guidance on how to close them through MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), among other interventions. One of these courses led me to a chance virtual interaction with a CA(SA), Joanne Searle, who turned out to be a champion of the SAICA mentorship programme.
Pathways to possibility
The re-imagined SAICA mentorship programme is a response to the question ‘how do we work together to achieve more?’ asked by the professional body’s Northern Region (Gauteng province) executive Nazeer Patel. It begins with a chance encounter made possible by CPD. It involves a chartered accountant who has charted a pathway towards psychotherapy and coaching. It inspired a collaboration to produce a programme which takes individual CAs(SA) on a journey of personal development and connects them to a community of fellow travellers. For Patel, the revised mentorship programme is the culmination of a long-term journey through the portfolios of leadership development and member engagement. His encounter with Joanne Searle represents a coming together of both themes.
Having acquired almost two decades’ worth of experience in coaching (in both the UK and South Africa) Joanne Searle contacted SAICA to enquire about re-instating her membership. This was inspired by the change in approach to CPD, which recognises that members are charting courses towards a range of career experiences. It was this encounter with Searle which Patel remembered in his considerations about how to provide a more effective mentorship programme.
Noting that previous versions of the programme had not yielded encouraging metrics, such as sustained engagement between mentor-mentee pairings, Patel called on Joanne and her business partner, Matt Shelley, who together founded the Sandton Coaching Centre in 2010. The pair collaborated with Patel to a produce a pilot programme encoded with the DNA of 36 years’ worth of experience in psychotherapy, coaching and leadership development. It launched in the latter half of 2017 and culminated in the first of 2018 with a final satisfaction survey indicating that mentees were at least 90% satisfied with their mentorship journey. These metrics contributed to the eventual pitch made to SAICA advocating for the programme’s extension. By 2019, the programme had grown to include a cohort of 29 mentors and 28 mentees (out of 120 applications). It also included a new group of participants called ambassadors – six mentors on the pilot who had decided to take on the additional tasks of working on the programme from behind the scenes. For the 2020 programme, 150 applications were received for the programme, which now extends beyond Gauteng province after the launch of the KwaZulu-Natal chapter in June of this year.
Sliding doors
The mentorship programme’s story is a reminder of how chance encounters can lead us onto pathways of personal transformation and the formation of effective relationships. These pathways illustrate the importance of thresholds – barriers between what we believe we know an, the opportunities for growth which lie beyond. Like the doors to an elevator, opportunity is a function of time which can only be grasped when we are prepared to recognise it and leap. It reminds me of a film I once saw starring the Oscar-winning American actress Gwyneth Paltrow.
In the film Sliding Doors, Paltrow starred as a public relations professional having one of the worst days of her life. The film follows Paltrow’s ‘Helen’ on the day that she is fired from her job when a dropped earring in front of a set of elevator doors determines the course of her future. What follows are depictions of alternative futures for Helen – one in which the dropped earring triggers a chain of events which leads her to identify a significant sign that she needs to prioritise her development and seek out better relationships to live a more fulfilling life. The other journey is one in which she does not drop her earring, continues life on the same trajectory and ignores subtler signs that fear of uncertainty is stunting her development. Both journeys arrive at the same inevitable conclusion – a life in which she is a more conscious and productive traveller. The former gets Helen there more quickly.
This short trip into IMDB (Internet Movie Database) history teaches us that whether we identify signs sooner or later, personal development is the inevitable catalyst for how we learn to navigate the uncertainty of thresholds between two different states. Our pathways to relevance or possibility feature a number of thresholds and dropped earrings. They appear in individual human journeys and the trajectory of a community of professionals. These journeys intersect and are all at the mercy of time. While the story of the SAICA mentorship programme has yet to become a screenplay or film, it does however inspire a soundtrack choice −ne which embodies the willingness to be the bridge between two states. It might be (it is still too early for final cut decisions) the late jazz icon Hugh Masekela’s tune Thuma Mina in which he declares: ‘I wanna be there when the people start to turn it around … I wanna lend a hand.’
AUTHOR | Mandisa Mpulo CA(SA)
