Being able to bounce back after failure, learn from your mistakes and forge ahead with resilience are vital skills both in and out of the workplace. According to one survey, 91 per cent of HR decision-makers predict that resilience will be key to employability in the next few years.
For Michelle Gallaher, La Trobe alumnus and 2017 Telstra Victorian Business Woman of the Year, failing is one of the most important things you can do. Watch our video to find out what Michelle learned from failing her first degree, and what failure can teach you.
Develop your resilience through La Trobe’s Career Ready Advantage program.
LBS School Manager Donna Burnett receives 2017 Award for Excellence in School and Faculty Management!
The ATEM Best Practice Awards for 2017 was held at the Arts Centre, with over 150 staff from Tertiary institutions throughout Aus and NZ.
Recognising professional management and administration in the Tertiary Education sector is fundamentally important not only to the staff recognised, but to the industry as a whole.
Whilst ATEM has worked extremely hard for 41 years to promote a culture where professional managers work to partner academics in the education enterprise, Universities in general still have a long way to go to achieve the same goal.
This award has sought to show that we are equal partners in the profession.
I have received an incredible amount of support from the Leadership team within the LBS and support from Managers within the College. This support has enabled me to grow and flourish in my role and has treated me as an equal partner in the operations of a large and multidisciplinary school.
Working together without hierarchical boundaries has enabled effective School Management, but has also broken down many barriers and allowed professional staff to have a voice in an Academic world.
To see is to believe, and to believe is to see. Malcom Roberts’s recent citizenship troubles betray his double standards.
LBS Business School Lecturer in Management Dr Angela McCabe and Dr Tom Osegowitsch from the University of Melbourne have published an article in Crikey contrasting the standards of evidence demanded of scientists by populist politicians, and those they adopt for themselves.
Read the original article on Crikey, here.
“Malcolm, you are hearing the interpretation of a highly qualified scientist and you’re saying, “I don’t believe that” — is that right?” an incredulous Tony Jones asked of former One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts during a recent Q&A episode. The senator had demanded incontrovertible proof of anthropogenic climate change from fellow panellist Professor Brian Cox, and made wild allegations about evidence having been manipulated by NASA, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and others.
Last Friday the High court declared five current senators ineligible to sit in the Australian parliament. Among them was Malcolm Roberts, who came in for particular criticism.
The former senator’s citizenship evidence to the court was summarily rejected. He was chastised by Justice Patrick Keane for his “reliance on his highly subjective appreciation of the importance of commonplace incidents of his familial experience”.
His own barrister, Robert Newlinds, said of Senator Roberts that “He’s talked himself into a different belief about that [his possible UK citizenship].
The former senator has made a name for himself challenging scientists and scientific institutions. Ostensibly he was holding them to a higher standard of evidence, although the same rigour clearly did not apply to his own, personal situation.
For years, Malcolm Roberts has been bombarding scientific institutions, individual scientists as well as journalists and parliamentarians with strong claims rejecting climate change research. He has also made severe allegations of scientific misconduct against individual scientists, which have been dismissed after due consideration.
Roberts routinely challenges climate change scientists to produce “any empirical evidence”, defined as “observations in the real world, it’s measured real world data.” When challenged by scientists such as Brian Cox insisting that there is strong empirical evidence, most prominently global warming trends, Roberts likes to maintain that the data are manipulated, by NASA and the Bureau of Meteorology, abetted by the political establishment.
Robert also criticises existing climate models, questioning their projections. These “models have already been proven to be inaccurate and the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has recognised that and admitted it.” Yet climate change predictions have worked well, tracking overall climate trends.
The denialist traits in Robert’s thinking have previously been document. The cherry-picking of evidence, the impossible expectations raised (for instance in terms of predictive accuracy and scientific consensus), and the underlying conspiracy theories are just some of the hallmarks of denialism.
Similar to democratic politics, science can experience gridlock, detours and errors. Progress often is painstakingly slow. In recent times we have also become aware of a number of serious shortcomings in the scientific process.
In modern science, the process for establishing valid knowledge, or rather knowledge “warranting belief”, hinges on peer review and professional reputation. In recent times, the process has come in for sharp criticism on account of a number of practices undermining scholarship.
The pressure on academics to publish (“publish or perish” in the vernacular) makes them more reliant on the scientific institutions and their gatekeepers, such as journal reviewers, editors and tenure committees. These then direct researchers by effectively sanctioning the acceptable (and therefore permissable) research methods, research questions and available data.
The pressure to publish in order to secure tenure and promotion may also lead to an inflation of “Type 1 errors”. A Type I error (also known as a “false positive”) is the mistake of erroneously believing something to be true when it is not. Scientific journals tend to cherish surprising results. As a result, scientists may test more frequently for contrarian hypotheses and produce more (erroneous) chance results. As reported by Scientific American magazine a number of fields of scientific endeavour may be plagued by a significant proportion of false positives and exaggerated results.
Equally concerning, studies that fail to find novel results may not even be reported by the authors, effectively censoring the publicly reported evidence. A variety of fields such as medicine and psychology have in recent years been hit by an apparent crisis of reproducibility and experts have pointed to the elevation of a disproportionate number of false discoveries.
In the social sciences, some of these biases and problems may be even more egregious than in the natural sciences.
Overall, such institutional biases are casting a shadow over science, slowing scientific progress. But scientists are increasingly aware of these issues and gradually the scientific process is responding. Initiatives such as the appearance of ‘minimal threshold journals’ and article retractions or campaigns to report all trials and results attest to the (albeit slow) self-correcting capacity of science.
Scientific knowledge is sometimes characterised as “warranted belief”. But what exactly warrants belief? What constitutes valid knowledge? How do we believe in the authority of a particular theory, given that few of us, even scientists, are in a position to verify them independently? We do so by trusting in the institutions tasked with producing valid representations of the world around us.
In light of the inevitable shortcomings of the scientific process, the scientific community as well as the wider community need to maintain a healthy degree of scepticism about scientific findings and scientific evidence. But scepticism can sometimes degenerate into paranoid denialism. Seemingly “common sense” explanations, or conspiracies can provide a degree or comfort when complex and less-than-perfect expert opinion abound.
Like democracy, science, and the scientific process, are flawed. But they are still preferable to all the other forms of generating valid knowledge that have been tried, including Malcolm Robert’s.
It’s a vexing question for those planning a career in tax.
In my 30 plus years in the profession I have never seen it face so many challenges simultaneously.
The most obvious change is of course digital disruption.
In part this is because the automatic exchange of data is about to balloon as information is transferred in real time as computers talk to each other in a common language using standard business reporting.
But it is also because of the investment being made around the world by Governments and business to effectively leverage their use of big data to make more informed decisions. This is even extending to the development of cognitive computing systems such as IBM’s ‘Watson’ system which can be applied to analyse unstructured data to provide answers to specific questions.
As a corollary much of the traditional tax compliance and process work will gradually diminish as data is collected, exchanged and analysed differently.
However, there are an array of other impending changes including, amongst others, a more informed and savvy public; greater cross border transactions as part of a more integrated world economy; increased offshoring especially of compliance work; more complex tax laws to prop up increasingly competitive tax regimes; a growing reliance on consumption taxes worldwide to provide a more stable revenue base; and an evolving international digital economy where labour, finance, and knowhow are mobile to an unprecedented degree.
Given this mix no-one can predict with absolute certainty where the tax jobs are going to be in 2020.
Nonetheless I believe there are some clear pointers as to how you can best plan a career in tax.
Firstly, the importance of being able to analyse big data in a meaningful way is becoming rapidly crucial to both revenue authorities and professional firms of all sizes.
From the ATO’s perspective it is their growth area as witnessed by the recent creation of their Smarterdata business unit which is not only focussed on analysing data but challenging paradigms as to how the ATO conducts its operations.
Increased globalisation has also heightened the need for businesses of all sizes to be transfer pricing compliant and develop defensible positions based on finding the most comparable data.
Accordingly, tax professionals wishing to augment their tax technical skills by developing business analytics expertise could well consider enrolling in a course such as the Master of Business Analytics and Graduate Diploma in Business Analytics run by La Trobe University’s Business School as the combination of such skills will be in high demand in coming years.
Secondly, if compliance work goes down rest assured the taxation laws will not become any easier.
Whilst many talk about deregulation the tax rules have only become more complex especially for governments worldwide struggling to plug a revenue shortfall.
One only has to witness the complexity of our general anti-avoidance provisions to realise how inordinately complex our tax system has become particularly the recent amendments which will supposedly crack down on international profit shifting.
Going forward what clients will require of their advisers is the ability to work with them in disseminating such complexity and providing viable commercial solutions.
Accordingly, the way in which tax is taught at both an undergraduate and postgraduate level must radically change so that students not only absorb the complexity of the tax law but develop the interpersonal skills to service clients and build referral networks in a more global economy.
This is one of the key reasons why blended learning is being introduced by the Business School as it is encouraging students to not only develop better analytical capacities but also to work in teams to collaboratively resolve issues just like they will be required to do in the workplace.
Finally, whilst the future is daunting in some respects it is critical to remember that accountants repeatedly top the list of most trusted adviser to clients. If you are overwhelmed with change so are your clients and if you need to adapt to changing circumstances so will many of them.
Keeping your clients close will be more important than ever before as will the need to provide timely, accurate and value added services and the willingness to be adaptive and agile.
Mark Morris is a Professor of Practice in Taxation at La Trobe University’s Business School where he teaches both undergraduate and postgraduate taxation and actively contributes to broader industry engagement initiatives between the Business School and the tax profession and other key stakeholders.
Mark also Co-Chaired the ATO’s ‘Future of the Tax Profession 2016’ working group with Colin which comprises senior representatives from the ATO, professional bodies, software developers and practitioners concerning the implementation of the ATO’s standard business reporting initiative.