Depth beats speed
Optimising for the shortest credential is a bad trade if the work that follows requires depth you skipped buying.
There’s a version of this decade where I optimise for speed. Pick the shortest credential, the fastest paycheque, the loudest title. Plenty of people do exactly that. Many of them are fine.
I’m choosing the slower version on purpose.
The CA isn’t, on paper, an efficient credential. It is layered: foundation, intermediate, three years inside a real firm, then a final. By the time it’s done, several years will have moved through me. I want that. I want the kind of fluency that comes from having to read an annual report at 11pm because someone is depending on the answer.
Speed without depth is fluency without grammar. Fine until the conversation gets difficult.
So: depth. Carefully.