Why some students choose to become chartered accountants (and others do not)

Cilliers van Zyl · Charl de Villiers

41 citations0/0 files storedMeditari Accountancy Research

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Accounting Education and Careers Higher Education and Employability Employer Branding and e-HRM

Abstract

Purpose South Africa, like many countries in the rest of the world, is currently facing a shortage of chartered accountants (CAs). The purpose of this paper is to examine the factors influencing the career choice of accounting students in South Africa. Design/methodology/approach A questionnaire survey was used to assist professional institutes of CAs, universities, audit practitioners and other interested parties to understand the factors that influence students' career choices. The respondents were first‐year business students at a leading South African university. Findings The results indicate that CA students' choice is driven mainly by job security, job satisfaction, aptitude for accounting and potential future earnings. Although a high percentage of non‐CA students have considered becoming a CA (61.6 per cent), they cite job satisfaction as one of the key reasons why they decided against a CA qualification. The two groups clearly have different views on job satisfaction. Another important reason the non‐CA group mentioned against CA studies, was the strenuous nature of this field, including the technical difficulty of the subjects and the lengthy period of study required. Significant differences between the CA and non‐CA group were evident when the means of the ratings of career choice factors were compared. All mean scores, for each of the 12 career choice factors, were higher for CA stream students, compared with the non‐CA stream students. A possible reason is that CA students are more career oriented than their non‐CA student counterparts. Originality/value This study extends the literature. It investigates and rates the career choice factors influencing accounting students to become a CA and the factors that influence business students not to pursue CA studies. These results could potentially be used to develop a strategy to influence students' career choice of the CA profession in an effort to increase the number of CAs in South Africa.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 41 citations exist upstream.

References

1958Theory and Methods of Scaling 2009Traditional accountants and business professionals: Portraying the accounting profession after Enron 2006Students' beliefs, attitudes and intentions to major in accounting 2006Influences on Undergraduate Students' Intentions to become Qualified Accountants: Evidence from Australia 2005Irish secondary students' perceptions of the work of an accountant and the accounting profession 1997Factors influencing accounting students' career choice: a cross-cultural validation study 2008Do students’ perceptions matter? A study of the effect of students’ perceptions on academic performance 2005An empirical analysis of career choice factors that influence first‐year Accounting students at the University of Pretoria: A cross‐racial study

Cited by

2015Determinants of student performance in an accounting degree programme 2018What explains student’s intentions to pursue a certified professional accountancy qualification?2018Shunning careers in public accounting firms: The case of Indonesia 2021Utilizing the social cognitive career theory in understanding students' choice in selecting auditing as a career: evidence from Ghana

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.