Professional skills and capabilities of accounting graduates: The Chinese gap

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to ascertain the capabilities and skills gap between the professional accountants and the graduates from the undergraduate school. I collected the data from accountants in accounting firms and senior students by online questionnaire. My questionnaire setting based on the Chinese background and learned the question setting format from the Professional Capability Framework with Paul Wells et al in 2009. The data collecting process was divided into two parts. In phase one, I collected 112 respondents’ responses and I collected 100 responses in phase two. I found that students and accountants have disagreement on the importance of profession-specific capabilities and intellectual capabilities. My research reports on a study which has identified capabilities gap between accounting education and actual accounting work and the results of the respondents’ feedback, provides a useful insight into whether there are some improvement need to be made.