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Popular thought dictates that accountants spend their days hiding in small offices and crunching endless numbers. However, according to Professor Phil Hancock from The University of Western Australia Business School , this is a stereotype that just doesn't hold true any more.

He's not alone. A group of researchers from five Australian universities, led by Professor Hancock and supported by the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC), has compiled a report entitled ‘Accounting for the Future: More Than Numbers.'

The report examines the ways in which tertiary institutions are preparing accounting graduates for professional jobs. Its main finding has been that the accounting education sector must do more to ensure that students graduate with adequate non-technical skills such as communication and problem solving.

The study was born out of a scoping study, ‘Business as Usual?', which was conducted in 2006 on behalf of the ABDC.

‘I think the challenge that we have, as a profession, is to actually make sure that our members not only have the skills to do that scorekeeping stuff, but it's also those soft skills around how do we communicate that to other people in a way that they will understand and can then use the knowledge as well,' said one interviewee in the ‘Business as Usual?' report.

Demand for accountants has increased exponentially in the last two decades. By 2005-06, 140,000 accountants were employed in Australia, and the skills shortage had led to an increase in visa approvals for accounting graduates.

Meanwhile, Australian universities have been struggling with chronic staff shortages, and large accounting classes that incorporate students from diverse, and often international, backgrounds.

The result, according to employers, is accounting graduates with a lack of generic skills. These skills include written and oral communication, teamwork, self-management, problem solving, ethics, analytical skills, and initiative and enterprise.

One employer lamented, ‘I'm finding that they [accounting graduates] can't actually think for themselves; they want you to do their thinking for them. If anything, their uni results show that they have got initiative, but it doesn't seem to come into the real world.'

In an attempt to address employers' concerns, Professor Hancock and his team set out to discover just what universities were doing to ensure their graduates had adequate non-technical skills.

They found that some universities were already taking innovative approaches to accounting education. As part of one third year auditing unit, students from Deakin University were offered the opportunity to participate in a field trip to a prison.

The students were able to question professional accountants who had been gaoled for fraud and related offences about the motivations and circumstances that led to their fraudulent behaviour. The prison field trip was received enthusiastically by the students and also assisted in them in developing communication, problem solving and self-management skills.

Another approach to the teaching of generic skills was taken at Central Queensland University. Due to its high number of external students, the university used the virtual world Second Life, as well as an intranet and online tools, to facilitate the mock audits of two case studies by groups of students.

The case studies were presented as machinimas (audio and video images acted out in Second Life), which allowed the students to gain a greater understanding of the businesses with which they were dealing. Additionally, the online tools allowed for greater collaboration between team members.

In total, the report identified 18 different methods currently being used in accounting courses to teach non-technical skills. These included encouraging joint out-of-class tutorial preparation and asking students to compile a business plan for a real-life case study.

‘If you can make these generic skills content-relevant,' argues Professor Hancock, ‘students will use the services and programmes.'

While the Accounting for the Future report supports this, the problem is that all of these programmes cost money. ‘Macquarie estimates that it spends half a million dollars on its programmes, and other universities even more,' says Professor Hancock. ‘For example, UWA would need three full-time staff to embed communication skills across all of our postgraduate programmes to help our Masters students improve their communication skills to the levels expected by employers.'

The proposed Learning Outcomes for all Accounting Bachelor and Masters Degrees in Accounting being developed for the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) include one outcome focusing on communication. According to Professor Hancock, who is Chair of the working party responsible for drafting the learning outcomes for the ALTC, this means that all universities will have to be cognisant of this requirement.

Employers are expected to welcome the increased focus on generic skills. ‘So, the technical excellence is taken as a given; we expect everybody to be able to have that and do that, but that X factor, that quality that somebody has that says they are a well-rounded person [is crucial],' explained one employer.

If Professor Hancock and his colleagues succeed in driving reform in accounting education, we will see accountants who can not only crunch numbers, but who can communicate, problem solve, and display well-developed interpersonal skills. Accountants with X factor. Whoever said accountants were boring?

Media references

Media Reference
Heather Merritt
Director, External Relations
UWA Business School
T: +618 6488 8171
E: [email protected]

Verity Chia
Communications Officer
UWA Business School
E: [email protected]