Like many compliance practitioners, The Man From FCPA came to the profession from the legal route: law school, private practice, then an in-house legal career. Before I got to law school, I had an undergraduate degree in history, about a liberal arts education as one could sustain. My father was a university professor in engineering so he had the quantitative side, which my sister inherited and I most decidedly did not. I lay all of this out in some detail to introduce the question of whether a compliance professional benefits more from a humanities-based education or a business school-based education.
Compliance is finally recognized as a business process. This has one school of thought around training to be a compliance professional to advocate a greater quantitative ground, even one based on STEM disciplines, which consist of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This approach is largely quantitative, focusing on big data and data analytics to determine steps forward. Moreover, with such specific business focused training, students coming out of colleges would be better poised to land jobs in the compliance field and immediately bring an impact to their employers.
