Graduates’ vocational skills for the management accountancy profession: exploring the accounting education expectation-performance gap

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on understanding the vocational skills required by graduates and assessing the competence of graduates for the management accountancy profession. It explores ‘expectation gaps’ by examining whether the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, practitioner employers and university educators have different expectations with regard to the important vocational skills for graduates. The research aim is to generate a greater understanding of the factors that create identified expectation gaps between the above stakeholders and to explore the implications of any gaps. The research was conducted by interviewing stakeholders and a survey of university accounting educators in UK and Ireland business schools. Expectation gaps between the stakeholders were identified. These expectation gaps appear to exist owing to conflicting views on the purpose of university education. The paper contributes to the growing debates about the general role of higher education in society and the role of university accounting educators in supplying graduate trainee accountants for the management accountancy profession.

KEYWORDS:

• University accounting education
• expectation gaps
• vocational skills
• educational objectives

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank the guest editor, Professor Marriott, and Professors Ballantine, Coad and Frecknall-Hughes for their help and encouragement, and to thank Hilary Lindsay, President ICAEW 2016–17, and two anonymous reviewers for their detailed and helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For reasons of brevity, the research instruments, namely the interview questionnaires and the accounting educators’ survey are not shown here. However a summary document describing these documents is available from the author.

2. Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (2015, p. 1) provides HE initial participation rates (HEIPRs) for ‘17–30 year old English domiciled first time participants to UK HE institutions and English, Welsh and Scottish FE colleges who remain in HE for at least 6 months'. ‘The provisional HEIPR estimate for the 2013/14 academic year was 47%, up by four percentage points compared with the estimate for 2012/13 of 43%’ (Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, 2015).

3. The Scottish Government (2015, p. 1) notes that the Scottish HEIPR has increased from 53.1% when it was first calculated in 2006/2007 to 54.7% in 2012/2013.

4. The Northern Ireland (NI) Department for Employment and Learning (2016, p. 1) reports that the NI Higher Education Participation Index for 2014/2015 was 49.2%, down from its peak of 50.7% in 2009/2010.

5. No HEIPR data for Welsh students is at present available for 2010/2011 to 2012/2013 (HEFCW, 2015, p. 2).

6. Estimated using data from Financial Reporting Council (2016, p. 22, Figure 11).

7. CIMA has its own examinations: the CIMA Certificate in Business Accounting and then three CIMA Professional levels. However, students can gain exemptions by passing the AAT Technician/Diploma level or by having a relevant degree.

8. QSR NVivo is a computer assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS). NVivo was used to code the interviews, to attach a label to section on text. Nodes are used in the author's research study to store coding about topics, concepts and themes. In the study there are 19 top level parent codes, covering topics, 12 of which were abbreviated labels referring to the main 12 questions that the accounting educators were asked.

9. The major differences between the approach taken in this study and that of Bui's and Porter's were:

1. the expectations of CIMA, the professional management accounting body are included;

2. the educators’ graduates competencies as perceived by educators are considered, instead of Bui's and Porter's competencies that educators can reasonably expect graduates to acquire, given university accounting education constraints;

3. the current author's framework has a competence assessment gap, not Bui's and Porter's educators’ performance gap and

4. the current study has a performance gap, but this gap, unlike Bui's and Porter's, consists of two sub-gaps: a constraints gap and a competence assessment gap.

10. A pseudonym used to protect the interviewee's identity.

11. Arquero Montano et al.’s (2001) survey of CIMA practitioner employers used an 11-point Likert scale. As explained in section ‘The assessment of skill importance – the importance expectation gap’, the survey of university educators used a 4-point scale and the Arquero Montano survey is recoded into the same 4-point Likert scale as used in the survey of educators to enable a clear comparison between the two surveys to be made.

12. The employers’ range of average scores for the 21 vocational skills is 1.33 − 1.84 = 0.51; while the educators’ range of average scores for the 21 skills is 1.53 − 2.43 = 0.90.

13. Arquero Montano et al.’s (2001) survey of CIMA practitioner employers used an 11-point Likert scale. As explained in section ‘The assessment of skill importance – the importance expectation gap’, this vocational skills survey used a 4-point scale and the Arquero Montano survey is recoded into the same 4-point Likert scale as used in this survey of educators to enable a clear comparison between the two surveys to be made.

Additional information

Funding

The author is grateful to the Chartered Institute Management Accountants for their funding of this research study.