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Accounting software provider Xero has “hundreds of thousands” of students in its sight as it looks to help push out graduates well versed in using cloud accounting software.
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Xero aims to tackle graduate practical skill gap
24 September 2019
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9 minute read
Launched officially last year, Xero Learn has now been rolled out to 34 universities across Australia, with 10,000 students now having undertaken the cloud-based education program, up from 1,000 students from the year before.
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Speaking to Accountants Daily, Xero platform growth director Jared Baker said the push to roll out the new education platform across major tertiary providers came from feedback from accountants and bookkeepers who often lamented about the lack of software training their graduates were exposed to.
“The big difference in this day and age with the digital tsunami sweeping both society and business, there is an expectation that you are digitally savvy,” Mr Baker said.
“If graduates are coming out already knowledgeable in Xero, already having used it in real-world examples in the same way they are going to be using it in the workplace, that’s a much better way to be arriving into the workforce than the way they have been in the last several dozen years.
“In the next few years, we hope to see hundreds of thousands of students all over the world graduating from their degrees with Xero certification and capability.”
While acknowledging that tertiary providers have been using other forms of accounting software in their curriculum in the past, Mr Baker said the point of differentiation was how Xero Learn was fully cloud-based.
“The way they learn on Xero is in the cloud, with access to a version of Xero that is as it will be in the real world, so they are not using desktops and dated systems of record to learn on,” he added.
“Yes, we’d love them to come out and use Xero in their own businesses or join a firm that uses Xero, but it is certainly not something that will stop them being able to learn another system and it is a transferable skill on whatever system they end up using.”
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