Lina Wang
I’m currently a Finance Director at Erhardt+Leimer in China, a global company based in Germany, in charge of the Finance, Legal, HR, Admin and IT Departments. I became an ACCA member in 2018, 9 years after I started my ACCA journey.
You may ask why it took me such a long time to become a member? The short answer is: my career development path is like a journey from Applied Knowledge to Strategic Professional. And that’s why I didn’t rush through the qualification.
I started my ACCA journey whilst I was working as an interpreter and manager’s assistant in the energy and trading sectors in China and Arabic countries. My work involved a lot of travel abroad which took me away from my parents and prompted me to re-evaluate and consider a career change.
I officially started my finance career in 2012 with a Chinese subsidiary of Soprema, a France-based global company in waterproof material industry after I had passed the Applied Knowledge and most of the Applied Skills exams.
During my years of studying the ACCA qualification, I felt that the curriculum provided me with the right knowledge at the right time. When I was an accountant, I was able to apply the full scope of the Applied Knowledge and Applied Skills syllabi right away. When I became a finance manager in 2015 and after I got my second bachelor’s degree in Accounting from Oxford Brooks University, I was taking the Strategic Professional exams. It really opened my eyes because beyond financial knowledge, there was also business knowledge and strategy. I still remember the first time I applied BCG model in analysing different BU performance and proposed to my boss which BU had the most potential and deserved more resources. The company finally made a breakthrough in that BU.
With ACCA, I started from being a non-financial person to finally becoming a finance leader in a middle-sized company, utilising the knowledge and concepts learnt from ACCA to continuously impact the culture and future of the company. Isn’t it amazing?