THE KNOWLEDGE AND SKILLS PROFILE OF ACCOUNTANT 4.0

Abstract

Businesses are nowadays experiencing extensive transformation due to technologisation, automation and digitalisation of their production processes and operations. The knowledge and competences of employees is a very important factor for a company to cope with those challenges in the most competitive way. Organisations have to increase their Digital IQ to capture the expected benefits from technology investments. Workers need digital culture and skills to feel comfortable performing their job tasks and it turns out that people could be constraints for putting digitalisation into place. Firstly, it refers to hiring the proper personnel. The so called digital natives should be attracted, trained and retained and the HR specialist are more than concerned how to co-ordinate the HR strategy with Industry 4.0. Identification of the required employees’ profiles and the missing skills and abilities are now of a higher priority. The necessary knowledge transfer, part of the strategic HR management, is facilitated by the convergence in research and development within regional conglomerations of companies along a common value chain. Secondly, it is a matter of investing in training programmes and continuous professional development to manage the missing expertise within organization boundaries. The paper is inspired by the increasing digitalisation of businesses and the impact of technology innovations and their augmented application on the accounting profession. The aim of the research is to outline and discuss the accounting professional’s profile in terms of the required knowledge and skills imposed by company’s transformation in the Industry 4.0 context. There are many implications due to digitalisation of organisation business model, value chains, products and services that should be considered. The author’s attempt is to perform and present a comprehensive analysis of their impact on the current status of the profession and future trends of development in terms of the required job skills andcompetences.