About the ACA
The ACA qualification has been expertly designed to give your staff the breadth and depth of technical knowledge across business, finance and accountancy, as well as the professional skills and experience needed to become effective and agile business partners in your organisation.
Benefits of the ACA
We constantly review the ACA qualification to reflect real business challenges. Today's most critical business challenges range from sustainability to rapid changes in technology and the role of ethics in the profession. Working closely with employers, members, students, tuition providers, academics and examiners, we ensure that the ACA equips the chartered accountants of the future with the skills and knowledge they need to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities ahead.
Once qualified, your trainees will officially become ICAEW Chartered Accountants – a prestigious title that not only holds value in the finance and business world, but shows potential employees and clients that your organisation invests in the training and development of your staff.
With limited entry requirements needed to complete the ACA, anyone can undertake the ACA including school leavers, graduates and existing staff, enabling you to recruit trainees from a wide range of backgrounds and education levels and gain fresh perspectives within your organisation and up-skill your current workforce.
Structure of the ACA
The ACA is made up of three elements which provide your students with a combination of finance knowledge, accountancy skills and real-world business experience.
To achieve the ACA, your students must complete a minimum of 450 days of professional work experience while developing their professional skills, 14 exams, and Specialised learning.
Professional work experience can be undertaken in any of our work experience categories, as long as your students' progress in breadth and/or complexity throughout their training. These include financial accounting, management accounting, audit and assurance, taxation, financial management, information technology and insolvency.
ICAEW Chartered Accountants are known for their professionalism and expertise. Alongside professional work experience, your students will develop professional skills to successfully handle the wide variety of situations they will encounter during their careers. You will support your students to develop these professional skills, while providing feedback on their progress at six-monthly reviews.
The ACA exams are positioned at three levels, building in complexity from Certificate to Advanced Level. The key themes of sustainability, technology and ethics are integrated throughout, while three case study exams prepare ACA students to tackle realistic and complex workplace scenarios.
Specialised Learning enables your students to tailor their learning to their career ambitions, role and business needs. Offering a wide range of regularly updated specialised technical, professional skills, sector specific and emerging updates content, students will complete at least 30 units of Specialised Learning to hone specific skills and areas of expertise.
Ethics, trust and integrity underpin what all finance and accounting professionals do on a daily basis. Therefore, ethics and ethical considerations are integrated throughout our qualifications – in the Ethics Learning Programme, all exams, and within the professional development requirements.
Success stories
Mercedes HPP has been training ACA students since 2016, using it to develop a team of agile business partners, proficient in professional scepticism, technical financial accounting, and strategic business decision-making.
The qualification encourages a culture of continuous improvement and professional development which is key to the success of Mercedes HPP.
Shawbrook Bank has been training students through the ACA for over 12 years, and more recently worked alongside ICAEW to establish a tailored ACA training programme to develop and grow talent in-house.
We've had a lot of support from ICAEW. They made becoming authorised very straightforward, and since then there's been a lot of support from their side with everything from posting job adverts to helping our students get up to speed with all the various bits and pieces they need to do to qualify.
Discover the ACA today
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Last updated: June 2026