Your Study Profile: The Worker

Your Study Profile Is: The Worker

You’ve always put in the time and effort to excel in school and you take every assignment and exam seriously. In fact, you take a lot of pride in doing better on exams than “naturals” whom everything seems to come easy to.

This might sound counter-intuitive, but one of your biggest challenges with the CPA exams will be trying to learn that you don’t need to absolutely know everything about every single topic.

Some of the best students I know that then struggled the most with the CPA exams were “worker” types, because they would drive themselves crazy trying to master every single topic.[/text_block]

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  Your Biggest Strengths

  You already have the ability to study hard and work hard… that’s the key to the CPA exams.

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  Your Weaknesses

  Trying to master every topic. There’s diminishing returns on trying to master the hardest topics on the CPA exams: you have time constraints and the exams have to be finished in a short enough amount of time that you’re able to recall what you’ve studied from every topic.

  This can also present issues if you give yourself 3-4 months per section because you plan to learn it all. When you’re spending months per section, failing one exam can create big issues with the 18 month timeline.

  Another challenge some worker-types have is not scheduling an exam until they feel “completely ready”. Which in some cases is a form of procrastination.

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  Study Methods to Focus On

  As a worker, your first instinct is to watch every video lecture, read every chapter, and meticulously work through every practice question.

  With over 200 topics on FAR alone, this will take an extraordinarily long time. And again, if you work full-time this is where people become extremely overwhelmed with the study process, because “learning it all” in just a few hours a day isn’t feasible.

  You need to learn to sift through the information and identify the most relevant parts of each topic.

  The easiest way to do this is by going through the practice questions first. For any given topic, there is a lot of text in the chapter. But if you go to the practice questions for that topic, you’ll find that you really only see questions on the same 2-3 concepts.

  Practice questions are the best guide to figuring out what you’ll really see on the exams.

  This ‘question-first approach’ is the basis of the study methods I used to pass all 4 sections in 3 months. We have a free training that walks you through this approach from start to finish here…

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  How to Structure Your Study Routine

  Having a daily study routine that you stick to 100% will be crucial to your success. As a worker, you’ve very used to this so the routine aspect won’t be an issue.

  What you need to focus on is making sure your study approach is helping you move through the material as effectively and efficiently as possible, and that you’re not getting bogged down with every tiny detail.

  Again, the training mentioned above walks through how to do your main study session in just 2 hours a day… but it’s crucial you follow the routine day in and day out.