ACCA PER Guide — Practical Experience Requirement
Passing the exams is only one of three things standing between you and ACCA membership — you also need the Ethics and Professional Skills module and the Practical Experience Requirement (PER). The PER is the one students most often leave too late, and the one where avoidable mistakes genuinely delay membership. Everything below is drawn from ACCA's own current guidance, because third-party advice on the PER is often out of date.
- 36 months of relevant accounting or finance experience — not necessarily continuous, not necessarily one employer, and it can run alongside your exams
- 9 performance objectives — all 5 Essentials, plus any 4 from the 17 Technical objectives
- Each objective needs its 5 elements achieved plus a 200–500 word statement in your own words
- Everything signed off by a practical experience supervisor — a qualified accountant (IFAC member or recognised by law in your country) who knows your work
- All recorded in My Experience, accessed through myACCA
The requirements, briefly
The 36 months
Time counts when you're in a relevant accounting or finance role — any sector, any size of organisation, and multiple roles or employers can be combined. Part-time work counts pro-rata: you record the percentage of your time spent on accounting and finance activities, and My Experience calculates the relevant time automatically. Experience from before you registered with ACCA can count too, provided the person who supervised you then can still review and sign it off.
The nine objectives
The five Essentials — ethics and professionalism; stakeholder relationship management; strategy, innovation and sustainable value creation; governance, risk and control; and leadership and management — are compulsory for everyone. The four Technical objectives are your choice from seventeen, spread across corporate and business reporting, financial management, management accounting, taxation, audit and assurance, advisory and consultancy, and data, digital and technology. Each objective links to specific exams, so targeting objectives alongside the related exam lets you apply what you're studying while it's fresh.
The supervisor
Your practical experience supervisor must be a qualified accountant — a member of an IFAC body or otherwise recognised by law in your country — with genuine knowledge of your work, ideally your line manager. You can have different supervisors for different objectives. A line manager who isn't a qualified accountant can still verify your time, but not your objectives — for those you'd need another qualified accountant who knows your work, or ACCA can help if your organisation has none. Avoid appointing a friend or relative; if your supervisor is related to you, you must disclose it to ACCA.
The mistakes that actually delay membership
1. Leaving an employer without getting sign-off first
This is the mistake ACCA itself highlights most. Once you've left, chasing a former manager to register in My Experience and sign off months of experience becomes painfully slow — and sometimes impossible. Before you hand in your notice anywhere, get your time and any completed objectives signed off. Treat it as part of your leaving checklist, like returning the laptop.
2. Recording nothing until the end
My Experience is designed for contemporaneous recording — you can claim individual elements as you achieve them, without waiting for the whole objective. Trainees who leave everything until after their final exam routinely struggle to reconstruct dates, roles and examples, and end up delaying their membership application by months. Recording as you go also means ACCA can see when you're eligible and invite you to apply.
3. Choosing Technical objectives that don't match your job
If you don't work in audit, you won't get the experience to achieve the audit objectives — ACCA says this explicitly. Pick the four Technical objectives that map to what you genuinely do all day, not the ones that sound most impressive or match your favourite exam. If your role is narrow, discuss secondments, project work or job rotation with your supervisor rather than trying to force an objective your role can't evidence.
4. Confirming you did something, without showing how
ACCA's own guidance for writing statements includes real feedback examples of exactly this problem: a candidate who said they'd researched and solved a problem, told to add what the problem actually was, what the research involved, and how it led to the solution; a candidate who simply confirmed they act ethically, asked instead for a specific dilemma, the action taken, and the outcome. A statement someone unfamiliar with your work could read and clearly understand what you did — not just that you did something — is the standard to write to.
5. An example that doesn't actually match the objective
ACCA's guidance includes a case where a candidate claimed an Audit and Assurance objective based on preparing for an audit from the business side being audited — not from within the audit team itself, which the objective specifically requires. A closely related trap: giving an example about your own team when the objective is about organisational management accounting. Check the objective's actual description and elements before picking your example, not after you've written it.
6. Reusing the same example across multiple objectives
ACCA's own tips advise against this directly. It's tempting when one strong project touched several skill areas, but each objective needs its own genuine example — reusing one dilutes how convincingly any single objective is demonstrated, and can read as padding rather than breadth of experience.
7. Submitting before your supervisor is registered
You can't send anything for sign-off until your supervisor has accepted your invitation and registered in My Experience. Invite them the moment you identify them, agree how often you'll review progress, and make those check-ins part of your normal appraisal rhythm rather than a scramble at submission time.
8. Assuming the Approved Employer exemption applies to you
If your employer holds Gold or Platinum trainee development approval, you may be able to claim the performance objectives exemption — but it's your employer's decision whether to allow it, not yours, and you still need to record your 36 months. If you leave an approved employer where the exemption applied, complete the Approved Employer PER summary form before you go, so your achievement is on record.
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Based on ACCA's current official PER guidance (performance objectives page and PER FAQs at accaglobal.com, and ACCA's PER trainee guide), checked July 2026. Requirements can change — always confirm the current rules in My Experience or at accaglobal.com/per before relying on them. GoQualified is not affiliated with ACCA.