South African Career Guidance Counsellors' and Mathematics Teachers' Perception of the Accounting Profession

Abstract

The shortage of accounting professionals is well-documented. To address this shortage, greater numbers of school students should be attracted and enrolled in undergraduate accounting programmes. Unfortunately, school students may have misperceptions of the accounting profession. These misperceptions may result in potential entrants to the profession being lost to other professions. Secondary school teachers play an influential role in students' perceptions of future careers. This survey assessed the perceptions of the secondary school career guidance counsellors and mathematics teachers' perceptions of the accounting profession in South Africa in comparison to the medical, engineering and legal professions. The findings suggest that the accounting profession is held in lower esteem than the engineering and medical professions, but in higher esteem than the legal profession. The findings confirm previous research conducted in the USA, Australasia and Japan. Marketing and recruitment programmes should educate secondary school teachers as to the true nature of the accounting profession.

Keywords:

• Accounting profession
• secondary school teachers
• perceptions
• survey
• South Africa

Notes

The narrowing of the target population, while removing the subjectivity of the school principal, may limit the generalisation of the findings to the broader spectrum of secondary school teachers in South Africa.

Sugahara et al. (2006) adopted a four point Likert scale following difficulty experienced during their pilot study with the 100 point scale of Hardin et al. (2000). This revised scale required respondents to indicate on a scale of 1–4 whether they strongly agree, agree, disagree or strongly disagree that each of the four professions (namely accounting, engineering, law and medicine) complies with each of the 24 professional attributes. This revised scale was adopted for use in this study.