by Rachel Bruce
I was in Dublin last month to meet with two of our partners, CPA Ireland and Accounting Technicians Ireland. As I arrived at their beautiful Georgian building, close to St Stephen’s Green, CPA Ireland was providing face-to-face training to a group of Lithuanian auditors. I was interested to find out how this was going as it is a new initiative for CPA Ireland. During one of the breaks, I was shown into the bright and airy training room and was introduced to John McCarthy, the presenter, who also happens to be one of our new authors that I hadn’t yet put a face to, who said that the training was going well.
I wondered how the language barrier was being overcome. CPA Ireland showed me that each delegate has a copy of the PowerPoint slides, each copy with an English version and a Lithuanian version side by side. In addition to this each delegate has a headset. In a separate room, while John McCarthy was presenting, two interpreters were translating the presentation which each delegate could then pick up via their headsets. It was really interesting to see this set up, and how well it was working and being received by the delegates.
The main reason for blogging about this though is that it reaffirmed something I have always believed throughout my working life: that even though new technologies are moving on apace, and facilitate amazing things in terms of building ‘virtual’ relationships, there is still a place for meeting people face to face. My reason for meeting with CPA Ireland was to talk to them about the development of their online portfolio of courses from our Accounting and Finance portfolio, not to find out about their training of Lithuanian auditors. However, in the process of meeting with them, on their turf, I found out and saw for myself one of their new initiatives in action. This has helped to further my understanding about how our partner, CPA Ireland operates, which only serves to strengthen the bond that we have.
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