It is with great foresight and some irony that Issues in Accounting Education launched a Call for Papers entitled “Educating the Future Accounting Professional: Actively Shaping Professional Identities for a Rapidly Changing World” at the end of the last decade. For while it was clearly predicted that accounting education would need to sharpen its vision through the “20s”—as the world was experiencing significant change brought on by innovation, technologies, future of work, climate change, and resource depletion—it could not have predicted just how rapid that change was going to be.The global Coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) has had an unprecedented impact on people across the globe. In fact, the pandemic is causing one of the largest disruptions to humanity we have experienced in the post-WWII era (McCalman 2020; Snowden 2020). The pandemic has and continues to place substantial pressure on economies, health systems, and global mobility, shifting the way we interact, our systems of governance, and how we consume and value resources (Giordano 2020). Accounting education has not been immune to such change, where the pandemic continues to challenge faculty to consider new ways in which to educate, students grapple with adjusting to the new reality of university life, and administrators struggle with the burden of crisis management in rapid succession (Sangster, Stoner, and Flood 2020). Indeed, the pandemic has upended academia, dramatically changing how faculty conceptualize and design accounting education, and how students socialize and engage in their own learning.The impetus for change in accounting education was already clearly present pre-COVID. Society was entering the fourth industrial revolution, an era of artificial intelligence, automation, and global connectivity (Schwab 2017). Demographic and social shifts, technological advancement, and globalization were reshaping the global workforce—with this only set to intensify. Current research estimates approximately 40–50 percent of existing jobs will be significantly transformed or disappear within the next 15 years (Frey and Osborne 2017; R. Susskind and D. Susskind 2015; Susskind 2020). The impact of this will be felt through the nature of work, with fewer fulltime employment opportunities, higher levels of casual and self-employment, greater choice and flexibility for employers with increased casualization, and outsourcing of work to international markets (Bridgstock 2016). In turn, this will affect the meaning of a lifetime career and professional identity, with current estimates that a graduate of today might expect to work in five or more industries and have more than 17 jobs (Foundation for Young Australians 2016). Such a changing world calls for new thinking around accounting employability, professional identity, and the fluid nature of work, directly impacting upon accounting education.A smarter, more connected world, set to face multiple future crises simultaneously, will require individuals to understand and work with complexity and demonstrate enhanced resilience, agility, and critical thought. This changing landscape highlights a need to facilitate the development of accounting graduates for an uncertain future with broader capabilities related to self-development (Pathways Commission 2012; World Economic Forum 2020). The professions of the future will require graduates to transcend traditional discipline boundaries and hold high degrees of creativity, cross-cultural competence, social intelligence, and be able to think in novel, integrated, and adaptive ways (Goos et al. 2019; Institute for Working Futures 2020). These distinctly human capabilities are increasingly being recognized as core across the accounting profession, as global accounting bodies redesign their educational frameworks to future proof the industry. CPA Evolution, a joint initiative of the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA), is an example of this evolution as it transforms the CPA licensure model to incorporate the rapidly changing human capabilities and competencies required (Vien 2021). Further, by placing a stronger emphasis on professional skepticism and information and communication technologies, the International Federation of Accountants' (IFAC) redesign of the International Education Standards (IES) exemplifies a strong call to action for accounting educators across the globe to integrate these human capabilities more holistically into accounting curricula (Vitale 2020).This of course presents significant challenges for faculty as they begin to shift their thinking and explore new ways to engage and confront the institutional barriers present. In turn, it equally raises a number of opportunities for consideration and investigation in accounting education research, including, for example:The pace of change in accounting education has, traditionally, been incremental and slow as the impulse to change has always existed at a relatively safe distance, outside the university. Those perhaps in the best position to lead change, the professional accounting bodies, with strong membership and resources, vast oversight of the profession, and a “finger on the pulse” are now providing that motivation as they prepare for a more uncertain future, reassessing the role an accountant plays. The pandemic has considerably disrupted that pace, with faculty essentially transitioning to a remote work model in rapid succession. Faculty, often reluctant to change, have in the space of one and a half years, drastically transformed their practice, illustrating the capabilities needed for such change. Over the past 18 months, accounting educators have demonstrated a remarkable capacity for change.The response to our Call for Papers was excellent and has started to address these challenges and investigate these new opportunities. The manuscripts submitted represented a wide diversity of topics and methodologies. We have selected 13 papers for inclusion in this special issue. Those 13 papers focus on multiple different aspects of our changing environment and the future of accounting education, with two broad themes clearly appearing across these papers. Neither theme is particularly surprising. The first relates to technology and the impact of emerging technologies on our accounting curriculum. The second covers many of the human capabilities and professional competencies that have become and will continue to be incredibly important for our graduates as they transition through the profession.When we issued the Call, we were certainly expecting to receive manuscripts touching on emerging topics like data analytics, data security, and block chain technology. The papers selected for this special issue indeed cover those technologies and provide excellent instructional resources, a literature review, and learning strategies to be considered for implementation throughout our courses.The second theme that is present across the papers in this issue is the continued interest in and demonstrated need for accounting educators to explore and teach the “softer” professional competencies including ethics and personal values. The papers within this issue recognize the demand from the accounting profession and the accrediting bodies for accounting graduates to have strong integrity, excellent communication, and the ability to handle ambiguous situations and even unsought information. The papers within this issue do not necessarily represent the full complement of human capabilities and competencies required for our graduates to be successful in the future, but the papers do highlight what is needed and suggest some effective educational strategies for developing those human capabilities.In discussions with our colleagues, we know that these two topics—technology and professional competencies, are important to accounting educators. We do not claim that this special issue will answer all of your questions about educating the future accounting professional, but we are confident that you will find the papers included here to be interesting, relevant, and provide some excellent ideas on how we can continue to adapt our teaching and learning practices toward these future trends.We express our gratitude and thanks to Issues editors, Valaria P. Vendrzyk and Elizabeth Dreike Almer, for their combined vision, encouragement, and support in facilitating this special issue. In addition, we send our deepest thanks to all the anonymous reviewers who so willingly gave their time and support to the journal and to us as editors of this special issue. The commitment and engagement of these anonymous reviewers, particularly in the constructive feedback they have provided authors who submitted their work for inclusion, has greatly enhanced the quality of this issue.As editors of the special issue, we are left with one strong conclusion after living through the past 18 months of the pandemic, reading dozens of submissions to the special issue, and working closely with the authors and reviewers of these 13 manuscripts. The future cannot be accurately predicted, despite what futurists want us to believe. Teaching skills in new and emerging technology is important; these skills certainly allow our students to hit the ground running when they graduate and lay a strong foundation to ensure they have the ability to learn whatever new technologies emerge further into their careers. But it seems to us that the human capabilities and the professional competencies discussed in this issue are persistent regardless of how the world or profession changes. And therefore, educating future accounting professionals requires us to teach primarily those capabilities and competencies or we risk graduating students that are unprepared for our uncertain future.
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Jan 1, 2024
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