IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/acctfi/v58y2018i4p939-963.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Practitioner mentoring of undergraduate accounting students: helping prepare students to become accounting professionals

Author

Listed:
  • Ralph Adler
  • Carolyn Stringer

Abstract

Employers have long raised concerns about university accounting graduates' business awareness and understanding of the real world. This paper describes and explores the effectiveness of an undergraduate student mentoring programme for accounting majors that includes as one of its aims promoting students' real‐world understandings of accounting. The programme has been operating for the past 12 years at a large Australasian, research‐focused university and involves highly experienced business practitioners as mentors (i.e. partners of accounting firms, CFOs, COOs or CEOs), who represent a wide range of industries (e.g. Big Four, small/regional accounting firm, healthcare, manufacturing, retail). The programme has been associated with a high degree of success. Compared with a control group of students who did not participate in the mentoring programme, mentored students reported having better professional networks and a better understanding of the benefits and responsibilities of being a member of a professional accounting body. Some support was also found for mentored students having superior understandings of work and career opportunities. As encouraged by The Pathways Commission Report () and the 2015 CPA Australia report Shaping the future of accounting in business education in Australia, the study's findings provide support for how a mentoring programme like the one described in this paper can assist with showcasing the wider purposes and career opportunities associated with the accounting profession, as well as forge closer linkages between accounting practitioners and accounting educators and better integration of accounting practice into accounting curricula.

Suggested Citation

  • Ralph Adler & Carolyn Stringer, 2018. "Practitioner mentoring of undergraduate accounting students: helping prepare students to become accounting professionals," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 58(4), pages 939-963, December.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:acctfi:v:58:y:2018:i:4:p:939-963
    DOI: 10.1111/acfi.12249
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1111/acfi.12249
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1111/acfi.12249?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Denise Jackson & Julia Richardson & Grant Michelson & Rahat Munir, 2022. "Attracting accounting and finance graduate talent – beyond the Big Four," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 62(3), pages 3761-3790, September.
    2. Denise Jackson & Julia Richardson & Grant Michelson & Rahat Munir, 2023. "Perceptions and experiences of career success among aspiring and early career accountants and the role of organisational support," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 63(1), pages 229-245, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:acctfi:v:58:y:2018:i:4:p:939-963. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/aaanzea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.