Social cognitive career theory and the goal of becoming a certified public accountant

ABSTRACT

A primary goal for professors in academia is to facilitate the career success of their students by providing them with the necessary subject knowledge, skills, experience, and confidence. In this paper, we propose the Social Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT) model as a useful tool to explain how accounting students’ career interests, goals, and intentions are related to their self-efficacy beliefs and outcome expectations. Results showed that the goal to become a certified public accountant (CPA) was significantly and positively correlated with the independent variables of self-efficacy and outcome expectations. These findings are further interpreted and pedagogical recommendations are provided for educators to utilize in their curriculum to enhance students’ accounting self-efficacy and outcome expectations. These recommendations may be used to help boost students’ interests and intentions to major in accounting and pursue a career as a CPA.

KEYWORDS:

• Accounting education
• accounting careers
• certified public accountant
• accounting pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 As an example, if a respondent who ranked the importance of income as a 4 (important) and thought the probability of becoming a CPA was a 4 (between 61% and 80%) would have a 16 as the value for the ‘higher income outcome’ component of the Outcomes Expectations Index.

2 The outcomes expectations index was factor analyzed using principal component analysis with Varimax (orthogonal) rotation. The analysis yielded two factors explaining a total of 63.4% of the variance for the entire set of variables. Factor 1 was labeled extrinsic rewards, for example, job security (R² = 38.3%). The second factor derived was labeled intrinsic rewards, for example, status and prestige (R² = 25.1%).