Ruchera Jayawardena, Business Relationship Manager, ACCA

Ruchera Jayawardena recently took up position as Business Development Manager for ACCA Sri Lanka.

Speaking of her current role in Business Development, she stated that she worked to ensure all opportunities are taken to promote and establish key relationships with corporate clients. "Throughout my career, I have had the opportunity of dealing with over 200 corporate clients. I am confident that the relationships I have built with these clients can prove to be beneficial to ACCA as I will work on making them to both understand and endorse the benefits that a qualification such as ACCA can give to both students and business entities," Jayawardena said.

Commencing her career at Jetwing as an Assistant Sales and Reservation Manager, Jayawardena then moved to Cinnamon Grand as a Manager for Corporate Sales where she took up the role to develop and increase business, while boosting strategic business opportunities and selling the benefits of the hotel to new clients with an overall aim of increasing the account base and bringing on new business. She also had brief stints at the management consulting firm, Ma Foi Randstad as a Business Development Manager & at Vogue Jewellers as Manager Marketing.

Explaining the marker position gained by ACCA and its reputation of being among the largest, most pro-active and dynamic accounting bodies in the world, Jayawardena assured that the body offers the ideal finance qualification in the country. "ACCA works closely with multinationals to promote global standards and aims to meet the current and future needs of international business," she said. "Today the ACCA qualification is considered to be one of the highest-ranking accountancy qualifications in the world and many ACCA holders have taken up top financial positions in both the Public and Private sectors.

This is due to the length and breath of the qualification that covers all the key aspects of finance from taxation, auditing and even ethics that play a key role in today's context. Therefore ACCA is easily the best option for accountancy in the industry," she said.

Outlining the marketing efforts that have been taken to build awareness of the qualification in Sri Lanka, Jayawardena cited the "Approved Employer Programme" where global best practice in the provision of learning and development opportunities for trainees and members are inculcated. This program looks at granting recognition for in-house training policies and development activities and will actively support the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) of qualified accounting and finance professionals. Jayawardena also pointed out that "We are also working on increasing this base in order to give more benefits not only to our members but to the corporate as well as they will have the benefit of having employees that have the knowledge and know-how of globally accepted accounting practices and ethics.