COMMENTARY Robert K . Elliott on Improvements in ttie Early Employment Experience

When the largest public accounting firms challenged higher education to improve the quality of accounting graduates,^ the American Accounting Assodation and many institutions educating accountants responded with alacrity. But many educators quite rightly held up a mirror to the employers and asked whether they didn't need some improvements too. This reflected concerns that perhaps not all was perfect in practice, but also a question: if educators develop better qualified graduates, can employers attract, retain, and make effective use of them? As a result, the Accounting Education Change Commission appointed an Early Employment Experience (E') Task Force to investigate how to improve the early emplo3rment experience. The E' Task Force is charged to develop a strategy to improve the interface between the education of the new accountant and the first two to three years of the employment experience. It is to consider the signals sent to campuses by employers' recruiting activities as well as their continuing professional education efforts. The E^ Task Force is concerned with accounting graduates from various sources (bachelors' and masters' degrees in accounting) who enter professional accounting careers (induding, but not limited to, CPA firms and industry). Obviously, some accounting graduates do not pursue professional accounting careers and some employers do not hire only accounting graduates for accounting careers (for example, they may also hire attorneys, computer engineers, and liberal arts graduates); however, these "side streams" are not currently being investigated by the Task Force. Early employment experience in professional accounting varies considerably among employers. It is thought, for example, that larger employers (both CPA firms and industry) generally provide better continuing education while smaller employers provide more varied experience. The Task Force must grapple with the many varieties of experience. Formal education is only one phase of the development of a professional career in accounting, and that phase must be properly integrated with the other phases. In particular, there must be an appropriate continuity between formal education and continuing professional education, impljdng the need to integrate curriculum development for these two aspects of education. The attractiveness of early professional careers—including compensation, learning opportunities, and working conditions—will be signalled back to college and university students (including both accounting majors and potential accounting majors) and will affect their attitudes toward the accounting profession, their studies, and the curriculum.