Mara Ridhuan Che Abdul Rahman, Tengku Akbar Tengku Abdullah, Arawati Agus and Mohd Mohid Rahmat
Borderless transactions have resulted in changes to the competitive and technological environments. As a result, accounting profession faces challenges in meeting these changes…
Abstract
Borderless transactions have resulted in changes to the competitive and technological environments. As a result, accounting profession faces challenges in meeting these changes. Previous studies have indicated that accounting education had failed to develop students’ competencies critically required by market. This paper mainly focuses on competencies in the workplace in relation to its levels of importance; as well as the level of emphasis of the competencies during university learning. In this study, 1,300 questionnaires were distributed to accountants graduated from seven state‐run universities namely Universiti Malaya, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Universiti Putra Malaysia, Universiti Islam Antarabangsa Malaysia, Universiti Teknologi Mara, Universiti Utara Malaysia and Universiti Sains Malaysia. The respondents were asked to rank the level of importance and emphasis of thirteen competencies; namely communication skills, decision‐making skills, leadership development, continuous improvement skills, professionalism, information development and distribution skills, knowledge in planning and budgetary, management control system, interpreting and analyzing financial statements, knowledge in accounting, knowledge in auditing and knowledge in taxation. The study found that there were large gaps between the level of importance of competencies in workplace and the level of emphasis of competencies in workplace. In addition, the study also found positive correlation between the personality traits and the level of competencies. In general, these findings are consistent with the findings from other studies conducted. The findings should provide empirical and relevant input for assessing the content of the existing accounting programs.
Details
Keywords
Intellectual capital (IC) is believed to be more important resources to add the value of a company rather than physical assets. This gives rise to the increasing practice of…
Abstract
Intellectual capital (IC) is believed to be more important resources to add the value of a company rather than physical assets. This gives rise to the increasing practice of reporting IC information in corporate annual report. Over the past fifteen years, considerable numbers of studies have employed content analysis to examine the extent and nature of IC information in several countries, but they presented different results. These results might partly contribute to different methods in counting information. In fact, the previous studies have been critised for not explicitly clarifying how information was recoded and counted which led to incomparable findings. Therefore, this paper firstly seeks to discuss an illustrative example of ‘sense-making‘ process in identifying, categorizing, and counting of IC information in annual reports of pilot sample company. Secondly, the method refined in the pilot study was applied over the final samples of six large companies in the UK from 1974 to 2008 The contribution of this paper is to primarily refine the previous method in recoding information, to send a message that transparency is crucial in content analysis and to facilitate method replication for future studies. Overall, this study demonstrates a marked increase in IC information disclosure was identified over the 35 years. The relational capital information disclosure was relatively more prominent over time, followed by human capital and structural capital.