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Abstract1
Constant technological breakthroughs change the way we do business. A wide variety of timely data can be used to help with reporting, auditing, and obtaining business insight. The accounting profession is transforming to take advantage of these advanced technologies. To respond to the drastic shift in knowledge and skills required for the job market, college accounting curriculum as well as professional training programs must respond quickly and appropriately. We conducted a survey in the summer of 2017 to help college educators and enablement professionals in redesigning their curriculum. This is the report of our survey.
Keywords: big data, data analytics, accounting education, auditor, accounting education
Introduction
Rapid technological innovations made transacting businesses faster, more efficient, and more convenient for both consumers and companies small and large. However, technological advances also transformed the ways in which criminals commit frauds. To combat accounting frauds, an increasing number of corporations and public accounting firms are taking advantage of available Big data tools. These tools vary widely in their functionality and objectives. There are tools to extract data from various resources, tools to assemble data from different sources and transform them into one accessible form, tools to help visualize the data and tell stories, tools for sophisticated statistical analyses, just to name a few.
The conventional skill set possessed by accountants no longer satisfies the demand in the job market (Drew 2019, PwC 2015, Tysiac 2019). To meet such demand, accounting firms added analytics into their training programs, and colleges rushed to add analytics courses into their course offerings. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that only a small number of accounting programs added analytics courses in 2017. Nowadays more accounting programs are offering analytics courses. Yet, the contents of these analytics courses varied widely from skills taught to tools used, which include Excel, Tableau, ACL, and Structured Query Language (SQL). In a professional discipline that is already filled with huge body of content knowledge, the accounting educators, who are also challenged with limited resources, need to be judicial in determining the most valuable new course(s) to offer to prepare new and experienced accountants for job market demand. Therefore, the objective of our research is to identify the most useful knowledge and skills in the age of Big data,...