Do we teach enough it skills in management accounting courses? A survey of accounting educators that explores the current use of Information technology content in management accounting Education shows that accounting students are not being taught the it skills They will need in the business world

Management Accounting Quarterly, Fall, 2006 by Akhilesh Chandra, John J. Cheh, Il-Woon Kim

The results also indicate that schools fail to make a consistent effort to obtain feedback from employers and alumni in regard to maintaining the relevance of management accounting curricula. The proportion of schools that do not have any systematic procedure for obtaining feedback is around 20%. These trends are consistent across graduate and undergraduate programs. Lack of systematic and consistent feedback from employers and alumni could be one reason for the gap between the IT skills provided by accounting programs and those needed in business.

Analysis of the data also reveals that innovative teaching efforts of the faculty are not always given due weight at both undergraduate and graduate programs. On a comparative note, however, the mean score for the support of promotion and tenure (P&T) support is higher for graduate programs (4.89) than for undergraduate programs (4.28). Most P&T committees focus on research efforts. IT-based innovations are both time-and effort-intensive and take time away from productive research. Because of this, faculty members have little motivation to invest time in learning and including IT-based skills in courses. P&T committee requirements for promotion and/or tenure can act as either constraints or push factors. In most schools, P&T requirements currently function as a restraint to the integration of IT into management accounting coursework. If explicit considerations were specified in the rules for awarding promotion and tenure decisions, however, they could act as a force of change.

Library resources are perceived as receiving the most support, with mean scores of 4.46 and 4.93 for undergraduate and graduate programs, respectively. Student access was ranked lowest (undergraduate mean score = 3.80, graduate mean score = 3.73). These findings confirm the results in Table 4 that computing facilities for students receive the lowest support. Making technology more widely and easily accessible to students is a major concern.

CLOSING THE GAP

The management accounting skills demanded by corporate America differ substantially from those currently supplied by the academic accounting departments. A strategic effort is needed to close the widening gap between the skills provided by management accounting education and those needed in the ever-evolving IT-based business environment.

Accounting is considered a conservative profession with a bias to the side of caution. It seems that the trend in management accounting practices is consistent with that of accounting in general. In this conservative mold, graduates find themselves poorly served when the skills demanded by corporate America do not align with those they acquired in the classroom. Further, this inadequate preparation imposes a cost on the industry that must retrain their new employees in basic management accounting practices that demand integration with IT skills.

ENDNOTES

(1) Russ Banham, "Close to You," CFO, Fall 2002, p. 18.

(2) Peter Burrows and Steve Hamm, "Is the Spending Drought Over at Last?" Business Week, September 15, 2003, p. 36.