Intangible Assets in a Student's Life

One of the most interesting expressions frequently used in accounting is the term ‘intangible assets’. Intangible is a word, not heard in everyday conversations, meaning something that cannot be touched, or something which has no physical presence.

The way these intangible assets are created, is what I find most interesting to talk about. Something that comes to mind is that these assets take time and effort to develop. In terms of an organisation, something intangible could represent the know-how of an organisation, the way it does business, how employees interact with clients, and in general, the “culture” of the organisation. Human capital is a generating force of an organisation’s intangible assets.

It crossed my mind that when we graduate, and hopefully get a job, we will be ‘that’ human capital, and it will be our responsibility to develop and preserve those assets. So, now that we know what is expected of us, we should better prepare ourselves for the task.

Given the title of this blog entry, a case can be made that our student-life is in a way, an intangible asset. We study and learn a lot of subjects, attend numerous seminars, take tests, and interact with our lecturers and fellow students, while also networking with many potential employers. All these activities have one thing in common – the acquisition and propagation of knowledge. These collaboration activities help us build our knowledge-base and skill-set which represent our intangible assets; Assets which, our future employer(s) would have to pay a lot of goodwill, to buy.

We have often heard the expression “we are a product of our environment”. After spending three years of our lives at university, it is inevitable that we would be influenced by its “culture”. That means, we and our university, are equally responsible for developing the intangible assets through collaboration, and knowledge developing activities that will generate our ‘intellectual property’.

Over the past five months, I was pleasantly surprised to find that, our school had given us the opportunity to participate in a lot of activities that are necessary for us, as students, to get a taste of what is meant by “business culture”. I feel that I have become a professional student, and all that thanks to the culture that exists at the school.

It would be a waste, on my part, not to take advantage of the goodwill shown by the lecturers who give us a lot of advice and guidance. The best way to develop our skill-set, is by following the advice of people “who have been there, and done that”. For that reason, let us all try and take advantage of these opportunities and make the most out of them.

Ellie Fanis
BPP University College

This post first appeared in The Accountant (March 2012)