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Introduction
“Big results require big ambitions” [1]. In recent years, accounting educators and the accounting profession have been seeking opportunities to develop further employability skills (Stoner and Milner, 2010). These additional skills are deemed imperative for the accounting profession to adapt to a constantly changing business environment (ACCA, 2016; CGMA, 2018; CPA, 2019; CPA Australia, 2019; ICAEW, 2019). With the challenge for UK universities in general to develop employment-ready graduates [2], this is increasingly on the agenda in accounting and finance departments in UK universities.
There have been calls for the integration of technology and data analysis into the accounting and business curriculum (AACSB, 2017; Davenport and Harris, 2007; PWC, 2015; Saggi and Jain, 2018). Accounting as an activity involving data, the processing of information, measurement, analysis and reporting, clearly has a part to play in the use of Big Data and data analysis (Basuony et al., 2020; Gamage, 2016; Lui et al., 2014). Accountants have always provided decision makers with information and data analytics and the increase in technology within accounting gives accounting professionals both opportunities and challenges (Stein Smith, 2017). Big Data definitions include either three Vs – volume, velocity and variety (Laney, 2001) – or five, adding the ones most pertinent to accounting professionals, veracity (accuracy) and value (cost-benefit) (Janvrin and Watson, 2017).
Other calls have been made for the assurance that accounting curricula include professional skills needed for future work in the “real world” of the profession (Bui and Porter, 2010; Jackling and De Lange, 2009; Pan and Seow, 2016; Rebele and Kent St Pierre, 2019; Tan and Laswad, 2018; Watty et al., 2012; Willcoxson et al., 2010).
In 2016, when reviewing the accounting education literature of the previous year, Apostolou et al. (2016) observed that “Big Data is transforming accounting practice, providing many opportunities for faculty to research and update curriculum” (p. 46), explaining that the American Accounting Association had run a conference and held seminars and webinars on the subject [3]. In the previous year in their article on expectations of technology skills for management accountants in New Zealand, Spraakman et al. (2015) note that the “fact that IT is continually evolving means the specifics of the required IT knowledge and skills change over...