A selection of online, crash courses are now available to guide career rookies and/or veterans in non-financial disciplines through commercial real estate’s key accounting and budgeting concepts. Attendees at the recent Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) of Canada’s annual conference were offered complimentary access to one of five short courses that underpin a newly launched micro-credential, which can also be recognized as a component of a full Real Property Administrator (RPA) or Facilities Management Administrator (FMA) designation.
“We’ve introduced the micro-credential to meet skill gap needs in the market. In particular, it’s targeting property managers and facilities managers coming into the industry, to help them get up to speed in the areas where they need to be able to hit the ground running when they start work for a commercial real estate firm,” explains Andrea Sine, senior vice president with BOMA International, who was on hand for BOMA Canada’s BOMEX event in Halifax. “We have heard from a lot of our members that one of the major skill gaps for new hires is financial acumen and financial literacy. So that’s where we started as the baseline for our short courses.”
BOMA’s educational arm, known as BOMI, has thus far introduced two new micro-credentials — Revenue Administration and Mastering the Budget — with a third slated to arrive before year-end 2025. Each micro-credential encompasses five self-directed, online courses, estimated to each represent about two hours of learning time. Registrants who successfully complete all five short courses earn a digital badge to verify they have achieved the required level of knowledge, and can apply the micro-credential toward an RPA or FMA designation.
Meanwhile, BOMEX attendees who opted to take Budgeting and Accounting 101 got the added bonus of expert, in-person guidance to walk them through the online overview of cash, accrual and modified accrual accounting methods and concepts such as assets, liabilities and owners’ equity. Kim Saunders, chair of BOMI Education Canada, and board member, Alex Hanson, led the morning seminar, and later weighed in on the short course content and the flexibility of the just-in-time approach.
“There has been growing attention on the soft skills of being a property manager — emotional intelligence and inclusive leadership and those kinds of things — but that doesn’t mean the hard skills don’t still matter,” muses Hanson, who is managing director of property management for Colliers Canada in Saskatchewan. “If you didn’t get a Commerce degree or don’t have a lot of experience, there are not a lot of educational options specific to property management out there for people who need to know how to do the job. This provides a new opening to support development of those hard skills.”
Along with the introductory 101 lessons, the Revenue Administration micro-credential includes short courses focusing on: identifying income sources; recording revenue; measuring property performance; and creating common area maintenance (CAM) reconciliations. The Mastering the Budget micro-credential delves into: developing an income budget; controlling costs; capital budgeting; expense budgeting; and preparing the cash basis income statement.
Each short course has embedded quizzes to ascertain registrants’ grasp of the material, and online students must successfully complete all five pertinent courses to obtain the micro-credential. However, the self-directed format also accommodates learners with a more scoped agenda — perhaps to refresh their knowledge of some concepts or to explore subject matter that may not be within their daily job functions.
“This is the future of educational convenience. People have very busy lives, but this is a way to break it into manageable pieces,” Sine maintains. “There is an ability to stack all the courses into a designation, but, for people who don’t need or want that, they can just focus on a specific needed skill.”
Saunders, a BOMA Fellow and property manager with East Port Properties, contrasts that with her own early career experience. She recalls making her way through the eight required courses for the RPA designation on a more rigid schedule that involved attending physical classes, which were offered on a set timetable, then writing exams.
“Our generation did all that after work. Today’s generation wants instant education and this is a step toward that,” Saunders notes. “You can take the courses in whatever order makes the most sense for you or for the area of the industry you’re working in. Or, for property assistants who want to become property managers, they can start doing these courses and then, when those job opportunities come up, they can be better prepared.”
The micro-credentials are also expected to begin figuring in industry mentors’ career advancement advice. As well, ready options for learning curve assistance may give employers more flexibility to consider otherwise strong job candidates who lack some of the skills for required tasks.
“If they’re missing a specific skill, they can take a short course in about two hours and be able to apply those skills immediately on the job,” Sine says. “It helps the learner — the employee — be able to upskill quickly, but it also helps the employer ensure that employees have the skills they need to be able to do their job quickly and accurately.”
Like all RPA and FMA courses, micro-credentials are grounded in a competency-based model, tied to extensive consultation with the industry about required skills and areas of knowledge. Fees are currently set at CAD $69 per individual short course or CAD $329 for a set of five relating to a specific micro-credential.
