Employability Skills Of Professional Accountants: A Comprehensive Review

Background

The contemporary business environment is observed to be highly dynamic (Kavanagh &; Drennan 2008) and turbulent, and therefore expectations from the professional accountants are also noted to be rising day by day. Amidst these changes, business leaders, corporate managers, investors, and other stakeholders are expecting different skills from professional accountants. Research indicates that the expectation of new skills and competencies from the professional accountants is a phenomenon of paramount importance not only in developing but also in developed countries. Professional accountants of Sri Lanka are also impacted by these significant changes as in other nations (Watty et al. 2014). If accountants are to find a value-added role in today’s dynamic business environment, they must be armed with new skills (Hastings, Philip &; Lannie 2002). At the same time, if they are not able to outperform with the new skills, they could become outdated in the job market. On the other hand, the failure of professional accountants ;  ;to meet their employers’ expectations affects overall business significantly. In other words, the degree of business risk goes up. Furthermore, market changes and technological advances have manifest themselves in rapid changes for all stakeholders where business practices, markets and capital adjust and/or move as part of a relentless quest for marginal revenue (De Lange, Jackling &; Gut 2006). Accordingly, changes in technology significantly affect the level of skills expected from a modern day professional accountant.

Accounting education worldwide has come under fire for failing to address the skill requirements in today’s dynamic business environment (Awayiga, Onumah &; Tsamenyi 2010). If there is no development or changes in the education curriculum, professional accountants will not get an opportunity to raise their skill levels to meet the requirements of the new business environment. Consequently, the professional accountants will not be able to find proper employment. On the other hand, their employers also will face difficulties in finding the right person for the job (Albrecht 2002). Therefore, educational policy makers should support the development and improvement of the skills of professional accountants. Further, the identification of important skills will create the opportunity for employers, professional accountants (i.e., employees) and other stakeholders. Especially, existing professional accountants could upgrade their skills, which will benefit them as well as their employers who could secure best-performing employees. Then, the educators and educational policy makers could identify the important skills and design curricula to address these important skills and competencies. Accordingly, the main objective of this study is to identify the important employability skills and skill categories of professional accountants based a comprehensive review of the literature on the subject.

The rest of this article is structured as follows: the next section discusses the methodology adopted to identify the required skills of professional accountants. Next, under the analysis, the literature pertaining to employability skills are identified and analysed and the findings are presented, followed by the conclusion.

Methodology

A comprehensive literature survey covering different key search terms yielded 26 empirical studies and two key frameworks on employability skills of professional accountants. These empirical studies related to different countries in different time periods from 2001 to 2017. In addition to these empirical studies, the International Educational Standards (IES) Framework for International Education Standards for Professional Accountants and Aspiring Professional Accountants (2017 Edition) (International Federation of Accountants - IFAC 2017) and the Chartered Global Management Accountants (CGMA) Competency Framework Guide: Generate Value for Long term Success (AICPA 2018) were considered.

In the analysis, first the skills stated in these studies and frameworks were identified and listed in descending order (i.e., ranked) based on the count of studies that referred to the particular skill. The skills that had a count of at least of five (studies) were considered as the cut-off, and therefore, skills cited in more than 5 studies were included in this listing. Using this comprehensive list, the skills that had the highest count were identified as important skills of professional accountants. ;

Next, in order to identify the most important ‘skill category’, the identified skills above were classified based on the different skills categories. Primarily, the skill categorization given in the International Education Standard (IES) Framework (IFAC 2017) was used. This categorization consists of intellectual skills, interpersonal and communication skills, organisational skills and personal skills. In addition to these skill categories, based on the literature review conducted, ‘technical and functional skills’ were identified as another major skill category. Accordingly, the identified skills earlier were classified under the five skill categories, and the percentage attributed to these skill categories was calculated (i.e., this percentage was calculated based on the number of skills under each category divided by the number of total skills). The next section presents the analysis and findings secured via the methodology presented under this section.

Analysis and Findings

As mentioned in the methodology section above, based on the literature review, first the listing of employability skills of professional accountants was prepared. This listing is presented in Table 1 in descending order based on the count of studies that had cited each skill. It is interesting to note that the skills of Teamwork, Written Communication, Solving real world problems, Oral Communication, Critical Thinking, Analytical skills, Negotiation skills, Leadership skills, Accounting software skills and Thinking and Behaving ethically are the 10 highest ranked skills identified in at least 15 or more studies. On the other hand, skills such as Adaptability, Ambition, Auditing and Assurance, Business and Organizational Environment, Commercial Law, Commitment to Professional Development, Commitment to the Public Interest, Corporate Governance, Being Ethical and Hard-working, Informed decision-making, Key accounting/Book keeping, Numeracy, Professional Attitude and Behaviour, Self-confidence and Value-orientation had a count of 5.