Proceedings

The third category of questions tries to outline the perception of the interviewed on
the transition from academic education to education offered by professional bodies,
the way these two broad categories of professional trainers interact (through the
perception of members of professional bodies), and to assess the need of evaluation
and control of the educational process.
The last category of questions tries to assess importance of discipline recommended
by the IES educational standards issued by IFAC in the activity of accounting
professionals.
A five points semantic differential scale was used for most of the questions to assess
the opinion of those interviewed. Values between 1 and 5 in correspondence with the
importance stated by the respondents were assigned to the responses (5-important,
1-not important).
To determine the hierarchy of skills a weighted average was calculated based on the
scores obtained by each skill, the resulting average being used to rank the skills.
We applied Chi-square procedure to test the significant difference between groups
using as differentiation criteria the age of the interviewed and their level of academic
education. Data processing was performed with Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and
XLSTAT add in.
2. RESEARCH RESULTS
2.1 The importance assigned by accounting professionals to theoretical
and practical activities
.
In order to assess the importance assigned by accounting professionals to theoretical
knowledge acquired during university studies on one hand and solid practical skills
acquired through practical work experience on the other hand, respondents were asked
to give scores on a scale of 1 to 5 according to their importance (1 not important,
5 important). The distribution of responses is shown below:
Table 3 The importance assigned by accounting professionals to theoretical
and practical activities (response distribution)
Theoretical knowledge
acquired during university
studies
Solid practical skills
acquired through practical
work experience
not important important
1 2 3 4 5
2 (2,56%) 8 (10,26%) 15 (19,23%) 19 (24,36%) 34 (43,59%)
0 (0,00%) 0 (0,00%) 5 (6,41%) 15 (19,23%) 58 (74,36%)
By analyzing the frequency series we can conclude that accounting professionals find
theoretical knowledge acquired during university studies important, but to a lesser
extent than solid practical skills acquired through practical work experience. This
could confirm what some of studies cited above, namely that “there is an obvious
discrepancy of expectation between the providers of accounting education and the
~ 884 ~