Today I’m excited to be talking with Hayden Williams, a national leader in CPA education. Hayden is Chief Financial Officer and Vice President of Education at the Washington Society of Certified Public Accountants (WSCPA).

Hayden started as a CPA almost 20 years ago. He was a staff accountant at a small firm in Arizona before moving to Director of Finance at the Arizona Society of CPAs. Following his dream to live in the North West, Hayden became CFO of WSCPA. After two years with WSCPA, Hayden transferred to Vice President of Education.

Hayden and the education department at the WSCPA provide about 1000 webcasts and webinars to their members. 300 are live programs, and the WSCPA actually webcasts about 100 of those live programs. There are also 15 conferences, 5 of which are webcast.

“In the last seven years, education has changed dramatically with the introduction of the Internet. The Internet was always here, but when the downturn in the economy came … there was an onslaught of education being provided via the Web.”

This includes self-study programs, webcasts and webinars, and that changed the landscape totally for CPE, where the state society or a county bar association had a geographic lock on education. That doesn’t exist anymore. Seven years ago WSCPA might have had 400 live programs and a few conferences, but they have actually cut back on live offerings to start producing webcasts.

If you aren’t familiar, there is a difference between a webcast and a webinar. A webcast is a video and audio presentation with a power point. A webinar is the audio with a power point. The difference is that you have a talking head on a webcast. Some entities will market their webinars as webcasts, but you should expect a live presenter in a webcast.

Before Hayden was VP of Education, WSCPA did their first live webcast. They had 300 people from all over the country attend the 990 course via webcast. “That always stuck in the back of my mind, so I thought we should be doing this on a regular basis.” Now, WSCPA has really embraced technology. They have partnerships with five or six states in which the WSCPA provides webcasts for those states, and the WSCPA purchases webcasts from other entities.

“We really embrace that technology and we’re not worried about saturating the market. We will have a class on 1040s, and three days later we’ll have a webcast of 1040. What we’re trying to do is penetrate the market as much as possible with all forms of CPE.”

Seven years ago, the WSCPA came up with the concept of the One-Stop Shop. They endeavor to provide all of the self-study, webcasts, webinars, and conferences and live seminars that a CPA will need, in one digital location. They haven’t grown their market share, but the WSCPA has maintained the market share they had before the economy went south, while many other associations are losing market share.

Online CPE has removed a lot of the barriers that existed even just 10 years ago, but Hayden has an idea of where continued professional education will go in the future. Hayden is working to make webcasts and webinars more interactive, and he believes that an important step is for the presenters to start creating an experience specifically for the web audience. Hayden imagines more cameras, a speaker that can talk to the audience using their names, and generally more engagement with the online audience. Hayden imagines an interactive application to accompany presentations, which offers a live workbook experience and direct interaction with the presenter.

“We have to start thinking about how we embrace that audience, how do we create that experience?”

I greatly appreciate Hayden taking the time to come talk to us. Continuing Professional Education is a big part of my life, and I love that people like Hayden are working to make it more accessible and more effective.

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Resources:

• Learn more about Hayden, CPE and the WSCPA
• Contact Hayden with the subject line “Improv is No Joke Podcast”