Factors Influencing Accounting Students’ Career Paths in Malaysia

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the influences accounting students' preferences for future career pathways. Career pathway refers to job options and job positions that can be chosen by individuals or students as a career. Accounting students can pick to develop their career into one of the accounting fields such as taxation, financial accounting report, management accounting, forensics, auditing, etc. According to past literature, the choice of career pathway is influenced by several factors such as intrinsic motivation, third parties, extrinsic motivation, and career exposure. Thus, the objective of this study is to identify the factors that can influence the career pathway of accounting students in Malaysia. This research expects different results from previous studies due to different cultural and educational environment factors. A simple random sampling method was used to identified respondents in this study. This study was used a quantitative approach. Therefore, data was collected by using a questionnaire an it was designed in the Likert scale method. This study is restricted to accounting students who are in Malaysia. In this research, two variables are tested to identify the factors that can influence the career path of accounting students. To achieve the objectives, quantitative methods are used, and data is collected through questionnaires. Data was analyzed using statistics. Professional accounting bodies may advantage from the results of the research as they might help to prepare policies in designing member recruitment strategies and the results of this paper meet the identified need to study the lack of certain career paths for accounting students can be resolved. In addition, universities may also benefit when developing current missions and policies for future accounting students.