Soft skills for accounting graduates

Abstract

Accounting graduates today are expected to possess both hard skills and soft skills in order to be competitive in the profession and workplace. Due to that, this present study is conducted in order to examine the reasons for the need of accounting graduates to acquire soft skills, to identify the importance of various soft skills to accounting students, to investigate the level of soft skills exposed to students and the appropriate learning and teaching approach to develop soft skills. A survey had been conducted by distributing 250 and 200 sets of questionnaires to the accounting students and practitioners respectively with a total response rate of 50.9%. For the first objective, the findings showed that the top three reasons for the importance of accounting graduates to acquire soft skills are to provide high quality and professional services, to fulfill the expectation of employers and to have better career prospect. For the second objective, the findings reveal that the top three soft skills are problem solving/decision making, teamwork and ethics. The t-test results of this present study showed that there are no significant differences in the perceptions of accounting practitioners and students on the importance of the nine soft skills except for three soft skills that are analytical/critical thinking, teamwork and entrepreneurship skills. For the third objective, it was found that accounting students perceived that all the nine soft skills listed in the questionnaire were exposed to them either to ‘certain extent’ or ‘great extent’ during the degree program. Another interesting finding of this present study is that, majority of the respondents opted the option whereby soft skills should be developed both through integration in existing accounting courses and through additional soft skills modules. The implications of this present study is that accounting students need to realize the importance of acquiring the necessary soft skills and consequently take active role to equip themselves with soft skills demanded by the profession. Similarly, educators need to be well-equipped with the necessary soft skills in order for them to effectively expose the skills to the students.