Education is the key to success

Author: SAIT CPD and Events

At the South African Institute of Tax Professionals (SAIT), our aim to continuously improve the South African tax industry. We provide guidance to our members, act as their voice to both government and SARS and work tirelessly to ensure that practitioners have a say regarding tax related legislation. 

One of SAIT’s most important pillars is education. The SAIT Education Department’s mission is to ensure that our members are constantly developing themselves in a professional capacity. 

Maintain your professional qualification

Through our Continuous Professional Development (CPD) programme we ensure that all SAIT members remain relevant and keep up to date with a dynamic tax landscape. We have regular training seminars that can be accessed both online and through face to face training, which cover all areas required to work as a tax professional in this country.

This training is a requirement to remain affiliated with SAIT. As a tax professional operating in South Africa, you are required to be affiliated with an organisation such as SAIT but we don’t just see this as a simple legislative requirement. At SAIT, we see this an as opportunity to ensure that tax professionals in this country are constantly adapting and keeping up to date with the ever-evolving tax landscape. 

We require members to do a minimum of 15 hours of Tax CPD training each year. This is not a hard task as we constantly offer hours of training either through our seminars, webinars or even online content that we make available to members. In fact, most members exceed the minimum hours because they find the insight and information useful in their daily work. If you haven’t started looking at what we have on offer in our CPD training you can right here.

Developing the broader industry

While the personal development of all our members is a big focus for SAIT, we also look to make an impact on the broader tax profession in South Africa. You might have already heard about our Learnership Programme, which aims to develop the next generation of tax professionals and allow our members to play a leading role here. 

The programme consists of three components – knowledge, practical skills and workplace experience. The knowledge component is achieved through a tax related degree in an approved tertiary institution while the practical skills through short courses or work related training. The workplace component involves the student getting first-hand experience of working as a tax professional in an organisation.

This is a brand new initiative so lookout for some communication around this as to how you can get involved and bring in some new talent into your organisation. 

If you have any questions about our CPD or Learnership Programme please get in touch with rdekock@thesait.org.za or contact us on Twitter through @thesaitsa.