A Practitioner’s Perspective on Management Accounting Graduates’ Competencies: A Canadian Field Study

Abstract

There is concern that management accounting competencies fall short of meeting the needs of employers. The blame for this has been directed to accounting curriculums that have not kept up with the changing needs of employers. In order to keep up to date, accounting educators are encouraged to collaborate with practitioners to assure accounting competencies maintain their relevance. To help with this collaboration, the objective of this research is to uncover the most important competencies that accounting graduates lack. To achieve our objective, we conducted 27 in-depth interviews with accounting practitioners. Our results highlight that accounting practitioners continue to express concern over the communication skills of accounting graduates entering the workforce. More precisely, management accountants need to communicate information so that a wide variety of people in the organization understand. This requires that the management accountant better understand the roles and needs of others. In addition, our results suggest that management accountants are adept at providing sound technical information, but lack the abilities to add value to information, by explaining how to use it and why it is important. We believe our study should motivate accounting educators to integrate more relevant and specific communications skills training into accounting curriculum, not only formal presentation skills, taught in most accounting programs. Instead, educators need to incorporate methods that could help accounting graduates make accounting information accessible and relevant to a wide variety of decision makers.