Finance Executives with CPAs

To all those finance majors, it may be wise to take a few more courses in Accounting; a CPA will be an added plus. Here is a snippet from the news article in CareerJournal:

"Not long ago, the degree of choice for an aspiring CFO was the master of business administration, with 61 percent of finance chiefs holding the degree, according to the Finance Leaders Association. But these days, with financial reporting under the microscope thanks to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, executive recruiters favor another set of letters: CPA....

This vision of the ideal finance executive is a far cry from the "strategic" CFO of the 1990s, for whom accounting skills played a distant second to deal-making savvy. For the time being, the visionary financial engineer has gone the way of Andrew Fastow. "These things go in cycles," says John C. Wilson, founder of J.C. Wilson Associates, an executive-recruiting firm in San Francisco. "Now CPAs are preferred in some organizations. If you have just an MBA, you may be perceived as [deficient] in areas like [Financial Accounting Standards Board] rules and reporting and regulatory requirements."

C.P.A is the abbreviated form of Certified Public Accountants. More information can be found at CPA exam site and the site of American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.