SAX LLP Leverages Amplifire eLearning to Gain Over 50% Time Back in CPE Credit Completion and Unearth Knowledge Gaps

SAX LLP faced a dual challenge that is not uncommon in the Accounting industry. First, supporting their staff with their CPE requirements in an efficient and effective way. Secondly, assessing their existing and potential new hires’ knowledge for effective support and placement.   

To tackle these challenges, SAX LLP partnered with Amplifire to develop and roll out 10 courses across a variety of important subjects including Audit, Communication and Time Management Skills, Preparing Tax Returns, and more. Amplifire’s adaptive eLearning platform was not just about delivering content; it was about deeply understanding where their learners stood in terms of knowledge and how to enhance it efficiently.

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Mastering Tax Season: How Personalized Learning and Time Management Fuel Team Success

Tax season can be one of the most demanding times for accounting professionals. With tight deadlines, high workloads, and the pressure to deliver accurate results, the potential for stress and burnout is high. As leaders, it’s crucial to equip your workforce with the right tools and strategies to optimize their performance and reduce the strain that comes with this busy period. By adopting personalized learning and smart time management techniques, you can help your team boost productivity, give them more time to focus on critical tasks, and reduce stress- setting them up for success.

The Connection Between Personalized Learning and Time Management

Personalized learning tailors training to each employee’s unique needs, preferences, and skill levels. In a high-pressure field like accounting, this approach ensures your team focuses on what matters most, optimizing both time and efficiency. By leveraging adaptive learning technologies, training can be accelerated, allowing employees to spend less time on training and more on high-priority work.

The key advantage is that personalized learning helps your workforce work smarter, not harder. By targeting knowledge gaps, employees can skip irrelevant content, moving through training faster and freeing up time to focus on essential tasks during busy periods.

Platforms like Amplifire take this a step further, dynamically adjusting training to each learner’s specific needs. This reduces unnecessary check-the-box training and ensures better retention of critical knowledge, ultimately enabling your team to focus on delivering high-quality work when it matters most.

Time Management Techniques for Supporting Your Workforce

Effective time management is essential during high-pressure periods like tax season. As leaders, you can help your team adopt personalized time management strategies to maximize productivity while minimizing overwhelm. Here are a few approaches to consider:

• Prioritize with Purpose: Encourage your team to start each day by identifying the most important tasks and tackling them first. By focusing on critical deadlines and tasks, they can avoid getting sidetracked by less urgent matters.
• Leverage Focused Work Periods: Encourage the use of techniques like the Pomodoro Method, which involves working in short, focused bursts (e.g., 25 minutes) followed by brief breaks. This strategy can help maintain energy levels and concentration throughout the day.
• Break Large Tasks Into Manageable Steps: Complex tasks can be daunting, but breaking them into smaller, more manageable pieces can help your team maintain a sense of control and reduce stress.
• Leverage Digital Tools: The use of digital tools like task management software and calendars can help streamline workflows and keep everyone on track. These tools not only enhance organization but also ensure that important deadlines are met without added confusion.

How Adaptive Learning Reduces Stress and Accelerates Your Training

Adaptive learning is a game-changer when it comes to supporting your team’s development. By personalizing training content to everyone’s needs, adaptive learning accelerates the training process, allowing employees to focus on the most relevant information and avoid wasting time on irrelevant content.

For accounting teams, this is especially crucial during tax season, as it reduces the need for repetitive training or re-learning. With tailored learning paths, your employees are more likely to retain key knowledge long-term and be better prepared for high-stakes tasks. In fact, studies show that adaptive learning can boost knowledge retention by up to 50%, significantly improving both individual performance and overall team efficiency during critical periods like tax season.

By continuously assessing knowledge and tailoring learning paths, Amplifire helps you stay focused on the most important material, improving retention, and enhancing performance during critical times like tax season. It accelerates training processes, allowing accountants to spend more time on their core work rather than revisiting training content they’ve already mastered.

Leveraging Technology for Efficiency

In today’s digital era, technology plays a vital role in streamlining operations and enhancing team productivity. By leveraging automation tools and cloud-based platforms, your team can reduce the time spent on routine administrative tasks and focus on higher-value work. Automation tools can handle repetitive tasks, leaving your employees with more time to engage in strategic work that adds value to the organization.

Reports indicate that 75% of accountants believe automation has reduced stress and improved productivity by handling repetitive tasks. By incorporating these tools into your team’s workflow, you can help them work more efficiently, reducing stress while maintaining the quality of their work.

Conclusion

Tax season doesn’t need to be a time of overwhelming stress and burnout. As a leader, you can set your team up for success by integrating personalized learning, effective time management, and the right technology into their daily routine. Adaptive learning accelerates the development process, ensuring your team focuses on what’s most important while cutting down on irrelevant content. Combined with strategies like time management techniques and digital tools, your team will be better equipped to handle the challenges of busy seasons with greater efficiency, focus, and less stress.

Amplifire provides a personalized learning experience that helps employees hone in on the skills they need to succeed, increasing retention and freeing up more time for high-value work. When you invest in your team’s personalized development and support their time management efforts, you set them up to excel during critical periods and beyond.

References:

• Accounting Today (2022). How accountants use digital tools to improve time management. Retrieved from Accounting Today
• National Center for Biotechnology Information (2020). Impact of adaptive learning on knowledge retention. Retrieved from NCBI
• Deloitte (2021). How automation is transforming accounting: Reducing stress and increasing efficiency. Retrieved from Deloitte

Limitations of Traditional Assessments

In the rapidly evolving world of business, staying ahead of the curve means not only upskilling your workforce but doing so in a way that is both efficient and effective. The limitations of traditional assessments are becoming increasingly apparent. To truly understand and enhance employee capabilities, organizations must dive deeper by assessing competencies to identify gaps and personalize the learning experience. 

The Limitations of Traditional Assessments

Traditional assessments often fail to meet the demands of a dynamic and diverse workforce. They fall short in several important ways.

• One Size Fits All: Conventional assessments are usually standardized, treating all employees the same regardless of their unique skills, learning styles, and needs. This approach is not only inefficient, but they also lead to generalized results that don’t accurately reflect individual competencies.
• Static and Outdated: Traditional assessments are not designed to adapt to the rapidly changing skills landscape. As a result, they can become outdated quickly, failing to keep pace with new skills and knowledge requirements.
• Lack of Real-world Application: Traditional assessments frequently focus on rote memorization rather than assessing a learner’s ability to apply knowledge in practical, real-world scenarios. This disconnect can result in professionals who know the theory but struggle with practical application in their fields.
• Limited Feedback: Once a test is completed, learners typically receive a score or grade, with minimal feedback on their performance. This approach can hinder the learning process, as it doesn’t provide learners with insights into their strengths and weaknesses or areas that need improvement.
• Surface Level Evaluation: Traditional assessments often measure a candidate’s ability to memorize and regurgitate information rather than their understanding or ability to apply knowledge. This can result in professionals who are not fully prepared to tackle real-world challenges.
• Pressure and Anxiety: The high-stakes nature of traditional testing can lead to anxiety, which may negatively impact performance and fail to reflect a learner’s true capabilities.

Given these constraints, it’s crucial for employers to rethink their assessment strategies to foster a more comprehensive evaluation of skills and competencies.

What Employers Should Consider When Building Their Assessment Strategy

When employers develop their assessment strategies and are considering which platform to leverage, they should consider several key factors to ensure they are fostering a capable and adaptable workforce:

• Personalized Learning Paths: consider a solution that generates personalized learning paths based on the needs of each employee. This ensures that training is relevant, targeted, and efficient, reducing the likelihood of redundant or unnecessary training and saving organizations time and money.
• Pair assessments with Continuous Learning: Implement assessments that encourage ongoing improvement and that align with individual and organizational learning paths – rather than one-time evaluations.
• Continuous Relevance: Ensure that assessments are continually adapted to be current with real-world scenarios that professionals will face in their roles. By choosing an assessment partner that leverages easy AI-supported authoring, your organization will be able to ensure it is easy to continually adapt content.
• Feedback Mechanism: Make sure assessments offer detailed feedback to guide learners in their development. One of the most dangerous and pervasive issues organizations face is the presence of confidently held misinformation (CHM) within their workforce. CHM is the information employees confidently believe is correct…but isn’t. When someone is confident, they act. When they are confident and incorrect, they act incorrectly. Amplifire provides real-time feedback during assessments, challenging and correcting CHM and allowing employees to learn and adjust their understanding on the spot. This immediate reinforcement helps to solidify knowledge and address misconceptions as they arise.

Experience Personalized Learning with Amplifire

Traditional assessments and generic training programs fall short of meeting the diverse needs of today’s workforce. By leveraging Amplifire’s adaptive learning capabilities, organizations can conduct personalized learning that accurately identifies skill gaps and tailor the learning experience to each employee. This approach not only enhances individual performance but also drives overall organizational success, ensuring that training efforts are both effective and efficient. 

Discover how Amplifire can revolutionize your training and development programs. Schedule a demo today to see firsthand how our platform personalizes learning, identifies skill gaps, and helps employees learn better and faster.

Conclusion

The limitations of traditional assessments are clear, and as industries evolve, so must the methods we use to evaluate and nurture talent. By adopting innovative platforms like Amplifire, employers can craft assessment strategies that not only measure knowledge but also enhance it, ensuring that professionals are truly prepared to excel in their respective fields. For training professionals, medical practitioners, and accountants alike, this shift is crucial in building a workforce ready to meet the demands of tomorrow.

Annual Accounting CPE Requirements in Less Time

A large public accounting firm came to Amplifire looking to reduce annual training time without compromising quality or readiness. Two adaptive learning modules were created, Auditing Accounting Estimates and Critical Assessment of Audit Evidence, and were implemented for almost 3,000 auditing professionals. This case study highlights the time savings, higher pass rates, and 61% knowledge gap that was uncovered through utilizing Amplifire.  

Download the case study.

SAX LLP Launches Innovative E-Learning Platform

Parsippany, NJ, June 25, 2024 — SAX LLP – a Top 100 accounting, tax, and advisory firm – is thrilled to announce the launch of its innovative talent development initiative, leveraging the adaptive e-learning platform, Amplifire. This initiative addresses the need for continuous skill advancement amidst the rapid changes brought about by automation, globalization, and artificial intelligence (AI).

Recognizing the diminishing shelf-life of traditional skills in the accounting profession, SAX’s platform aims to equip professionals with skills that address modern challenges, with a continued learning approach that helps them to keep up with the ever-changing industry. The firm’s new initiative leverages Amplifire’s brain science-based, adaptive learning platform, which tailors the learning experience to each individual’s specific needs, focusing on specific learning gaps rather than a one-size-fits-all approach. This patented method accelerates the time to competency and enhances long-term retention of key information.

The program is structured around a flipped learning model, where employees engage with online courses at their own pace and convenience, followed by participatory, live virtual workshops. These workshops are designed to simulate real-world scenarios, fostering an environment where learners can apply their knowledge, interact with peers, and gain insights from the firm’s internal experts. The program will offer SAX’s client-facing CPAs and tax professionals courses ranging in topics, such as tax compliance, auditing, soft skills, and beyond.    

At SAX LLP, the company’s growth strategy is centered on innovation and leveraging cutting-edge technology. 

“Innovation and leveraging cutting-edge technologies are paramount to SAX’s overall growth strategy,” said SAX LLP CEO and managing partner Joseph Damiano. “By adopting advanced technologies such as AI, the firm enhances its efficiency in traditional accounting tasks while ensuring accuracy and compliance.”

SAX’s flexible learning solution is available worldwide, allowing team members across the U.S. and India to access. Moreover, the collaboration with peer firms through the Accounting Alliance enriches the learning ecosystem, providing a broader spectrum of courses and expertise.

“By investing in our team’s continuous development, we are not only preparing them for the challenges of today but also empowering them to lead in the evolving landscape of the accounting and advisory industry,” said SAX LLP Director of Learning & Development, Nick Romanowski.

SAX’s commitment to fostering an environment of continuous growth and development is a testament to its dedication to excellence and innovation. This new professional learning initiative seeks to set a new standard, expediting career progression and enabling the firm to swiftly adapt to industry changes.

About SAX LLP

SAX LLP is a Top 100 accounting, tax, and advisory firm serving the needs of privately held companies, family-owned businesses, nonprofit organizations, and high-net-worth individuals. With offices in Parsippany, NJ, Ewing, NJ, New York City, NY, and Mumbai, India, SAX has specialized expertise that benefits clients in our largest vertical markets. SAX provides added value to clients through advisory services that include but are not limited to Cybersecurity and Managed IT, Investment Banking, Transaction Advisory, HR Consulting, Valuation, Forensic & Litigation and Wealth Management. SAX has been nationally ranked and listed among the Top Accounting Firms by NJBIZ, INSIDE Public Accounting (IPA), Accounting Today and Forbes. For more information, please visit www.saxllp.com.

About Amplifire

Amplifire is a next-generation adaptive learning platform with more than four billion learner interactions and is an innovator in high-stakes workforce training for critical roles. The Amplifire platform harnesses advances in cognitive and learning science to create personalized learning and drive successful outcomes. The platform’s adaptive algorithm guides millions of learners to mastery across healthcare, accounting and professional services, government, military, food service, corporate, and education segments, providing unique learner analytics that offer valuable insights. For more information, please visit www.amplifire.com.

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