The employers’ priorities : vocational skills and capabilities for management accountants

There has been increasing pressure on the providers of higher education to align courses with the needs of employers. Surveys have documented the importance of developing a broad range of vocational skills. However, priorities must be established, based on the demands of the workplace, within this identified skills gap. The first section of this paper identifies the need for the development of vocational skills in general, and then specifically in the area of management accounting. The second section presents the views of employers of management accountants on the relative importance of a specified set of vocational skills, and the level of these skills exhibited by graduates and recently qualified management accountants. These measures are then combined in a ‘weighted importance indicator’ to indicate the skills that are most in need of development.