Qualified - The Years Before the Letters After Your Name

There's a particular kind of impatience that comes with wanting to change your life. You can see the person you want to be clearly, the qualification, the confidence, the letters after your name, and the distance between here and there feels unbearable. You want it now, not in three years' time, after exam after exam after exam.

I think about Rita a lot, from Willy Russell's film Educating Rita. A hairdresser who enrols in an Open University course because she wants, in her words, to "discover meself first." She isn't chasing a certificate. She's chasing a version of herself she hasn't met yet, and she knows, even as she starts, that it will take years to get there.

"I had a choice. I chose me."

Ask anyone who's qualified and they'll tell you honestly: there's no shortcut. Becoming a chartered accountant in the UK typically means three to five years of study and professional exams, ACCA, ACA or CIMA, usually on top of a full-time job, evenings and weekends spent revising when you'd rather be watching TV.

That's not a flaw in the system. It's the system working as intended. You can't cram the judgement, the pattern recognition, the calm-under-pressure that comes from having seen a hundred versions of the same problem. Some things can only be built slowly, one exam, one client, one year at a time.

What actually moves you forward: showing up for the next exam, not the whole qualification. Doing the unglamorous groundwork nobody sees. Letting your standards rise faster than your confidence. Asking for help instead of pretending you already know. Refusing to measure your year three against someone else's year ten.

Qualifying as a CIMA accountant took years of study around a full working life, and there were plenty of evenings I wondered if it was worth it. It was, not because of the letters after my name, but because of who I'd become by the time I'd earned them.

You don't have to have arrived to be on your way. If you're mid-exam, mid-doubt, mid-transformation, keep going. The person you're becoming is worth every one of the years it takes.

About Hermit Business Solutions: Linda is a CIMA-qualified chartered management accountant based in Baildon, working with sole traders and small businesses across Shipley and West Yorkshire. As a Certified Partner on QuickBooks, Xero and Sage we provide bookkeeping, VAT, management accounts, MTD and statutory account services as well as cashflow and forecasting assistance.