Key takeaways
- I have been completing the CMA (Cost and Management Accountant) qualification from ICMAB in stages, alongside a full-time finance career — it is a long-running, partially completed effort, not a finished credential.
- Studying while working changed what I actually study: less memorization, more "how does this apply to what I did at work this month."
- Protecting study time required treating it like a real calendar commitment, not something done only when everything else was finished.
- Progress has been slower than a full-time student's, and that trade-off was made deliberately.
I want to be upfront about this one: the CMA qualification from ICMAB (the Institute of Cost and Management Accountants of Bangladesh) is something I have been completing in stages since 2013, alongside full-time finance roles, and it is still a work in progress rather than a finished credential. I am writing about it anyway, because the experience of studying professional-level cost and management accounting while actually doing the job it describes taught me things a study-only path would not have.
Why this took longer than it "should" have
A full-time student can dedicate a semester to a subject. A working finance manager fits study around close cycles, audits, reporting deadlines and, in years with major projects, around implementation work that consumes evenings anyway. I made a deliberate trade-off: keep progressing steadily rather than pausing the career to finish faster, or pausing the studies during genuinely demanding periods rather than doing both badly at once. That trade-off is not right for everyone, but it was the right one for the roles and responsibilities I had at the time.
What studying while working actually changed about how I studied
The biggest shift was not effort, it was relevance. A theoretical costing method stopped being an abstract exam topic the moment I could test it against an actual product-costing question at work the same week. Sections on budgeting, variance analysis and management control systems landed differently once I had already lived through a real annual budgeting cycle. The job did not make the syllabus easier, but it made large parts of it concrete instead of theoretical, which is a different kind of easier.
How I actually protected study time
- Treated study blocks as real calendar commitments, not "whatever is left over" after work, the same way a client meeting would be treated.
- Used slow periods deliberately — the weeks between month-end close and the next reporting cycle absorbed more study time than the close weeks themselves ever could.
- Accepted some slow stretches without guilt — during a major project or an audit period, study slowed down, and treating that as a normal trade-off rather than a personal failure made it sustainable to keep going afterward.
Why I am putting an unfinished qualification on my own website
It would be easy to describe this more impressively than it is. I would rather it be accurate: a professional qualification I respect, that I have been completing in stages for genuine reasons, alongside a career that has itself been a serious and demanding education. If you are earlier in a similar path, working full-time and studying towards a professional qualification at the same time, I hope the honest version of this is more useful than a tidier one would have been.
Where this connects to the rest of my work
The cost and management accounting concepts from CMA study show up directly in the finance work I write about elsewhere on this site — particularly in Workforce Productivity to Profitability, which leans heavily on cost-behavior and standard-costing logic that this qualification is built around.
Written by Liakat Hossain
Finance and accounts professional with experience in FP&A, SAP FICO, Power BI, internal control, reporting, audit, tax, VAT and export-oriented business operations.
This is an original blog post written by Liakat Hossain, drawing on his own professional and personal experience. It is a personal reflection, not regulatory, tax, legal or investment advice; verify any technical or professional point against current standards before relying on it.