Edinburgh Napier University as Research Partner to the Scottish Accountancy Awards

Scottish Accountancy Awards 2012

Each year, Business Insider Magazine organises the Scottish Accountancy Awards in order to celebrate the successes of the accounting industry over the previous twelve months,

For the past three years, the School of Accounting, Financial Services and Law has acted as the Research Partner for the Awards and this involves a considerable amount of work in preparing the series of questions which constitute the background to the applications which are made on behalf of the organisations and individuals nominated for awards. We also compile the nominations in each category into packs which are provided to the judging panel. I say ‘we’ but the bulk of the work is done by my colleagues Laura Peers and Pat Wilson and an enormous amount of credit is due to them for the efforts they put into the background research and the preparation of the materials. 

I was fortunate enough to be invited to be a member of the judging panel this year. The panel was chaired by the Chief Executive of the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre John Sharkey, who is a member of the Council of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Scotland and the other panel members were Sir John Elvidge, Former Permanent Secretary, Scottish Government, Alan Esson, Deputy President of ACCA Scotland and Jann Brown, Finance Director at Cairn Energy.

The Awards were presented at a dinner in Glasgow on 21 June which was attended  by some 420 guests from a range of Accountancy backgrounds including many professional firms and a number of organisations within the public and private sector. It was great to see Edinburgh Napier University getting a huge amount of publicity, not just from the various speakers who mentioned our involvement, but also as a result of our logo appearing in the backdrop to the stage for the whole evening. 

I was asked to present the Award for the Public Sector Finance Team of the Year, which was won by Aberdeen District Council and I took the opportunity, while expressing our pleasure at being able to support the Awards, to emphasise our commitment to the employability of our graduates and the importance of our strong relationships with the various professional Accountancy bodies in helping our students to prepare themselves as well as possible for careers in the profession.

Overall, it was an excellent evening and I would have to say that all of the effort put into these awards is more than returned to us through the substantial amount of good publicity which we got on the evening.

My sincere thanks go to all my colleagues who were involved.

Stewart Falconer

Head of School

Accounting, Financial Services and Law