Date of Graduation

12-2018

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science in Business Administration

Degree Level

Undergraduate

Department

Accounting

Advisor/Mentor

Terrell, Katie

Committee Member/Reader

Shipman, Jonathan

Abstract

Since the publication of a special report by the American Accounting Association’s (AAA) Committee on the Future Structure, Content, and Scope of Accounting education in 1986, professionals and educators alike have been calling for a change to the accounting curriculum to better prepare the accounting graduate for the professional world. There is a stark division on which skill areas should be improved. That special report predicted “an accounting profession that will provide information for economic and social decisions, using sophisticated measurement and communication technologies applied to a substantially enlarged scope of phenomena” (AAA, 1986). AAA (1986) commented on how the accounting profession was expanding and touched on several topics including accounting information systems and what we would now call soft skills, though more in the problem solving and critical thinking areas. More recently, Low, Botes, Rue, and Allen (2016) interviewed professionals on which skills accounting graduates lacked and found that most professionals assumed that accounting graduates had about the same technical knowledge, and what technical knowledge they didn’t have could be addressed in on-the-job training. Instead, when interviewing for new staff accountants, professionals looked more at the soft skills that the potential hires possessed than the technical skills they had listed on their resumé. On the other side of the argument, Pan and Seow (2016) focused on the technological skills that accounting graduates are lacking, particularly the most recent technologies such as IT control and data analytics, and proposed a few new courses to address these technological skills.

Keywords

Accounting education; analytics; accounting skills; Education technology

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