Latest ICAS research highlights our CA Students’ priorities
Findings from our recent survey of ICAS CA Students are helping to shape future improvements to the services we provide.
Over the last few years, ICAS has increased the activities of its listening programme. This programme takes several forms, including online surveys, workshops and one-to-one research interviews, and gathers feedback from our various customer groups: CA Students, Members, firms and non-member key influencers.
By monitoring these views, we can make evidence-based decisions that will help to shape improvements and increase satisfaction with the services we provide.
What our CA Students told us recently
Following on from research into ICAS Members' priorities and experiences, we recently commissioned an online survey which was sent to all of our CA Students. Here are some of the key findings:
- The most important areas for our CA Students are ‘quality of materials’, ‘content of the syllabus’ and ‘ICAS reputation’.
- The areas with the highest satisfaction are ‘ICAS reputation’, ‘classroom-based teaching’ and ‘quality of ICAS materials’.
- Areas highlighted as requiring improvement were response times, the quality of information received, and the efficiency of ICAS administration.
- More CA Students consider the new online learning format to be successful, with those finding it unsuccessful citing lack of interaction with lecturers, problems with technology, and late or slow communications from ICAS.
- Two-in-three prefer classroom learning with one-in-five preferring online learning.
- We also gathered information on diversity to ensure that our boards, committees and strategy deliver to our CA Students’ and Members’ diverse needs.
Acting upon the feedback
To address the findings of this research we are developing an action plan which includes:
- Improving how we communicate exam instructions and taking steps to improve our CA Students' exam-day experience.
- Real-time Teams chat support for exams.
- Reducing email response times to provide a timely and accurate response to questions.
- Employing a dedicated Student Communications Executive to build a communications strategy and more-frequently engage with our CA Students.
- Enhancing the icas.com experience.
- Exploring ways that we can further support our CA Students' wellbeing.
- Issuing thought articles via social media/icas.com to further the learning experience.
- Ensuring that we listen to CA Students' views in various ways throughout the year.
Thanks for your input
We are grateful to all CA Students and Members who have taken the time to get involved with recent surveys and related initiatives, and we would encourage you to please try to help if you can when requested in the future – we really do value your feedback, and it really does feed value back into the services we provide.