Practitioner mentoring of undergraduate accounting students: helping prepare students to become accounting professionals

Employers have long raised concerns about university accounting graduates' business awareness and understanding of the real world. This paper describes and explores the effectiveness of an undergraduate student mentoring programme for accounting majors that includes as one of its aims promoting students' real‐world understandings of accounting. The programme has been operating for the past 12 years at a large Australasian, research‐focused university and involves highly experienced business practitioners as mentors (i.e. partners of accounting firms, CFOs, COOs or CEOs), who represent a wide range of industries (e.g. Big Four, small/regional accounting firm, healthcare, manufacturing, retail). The programme has been associated with a high degree of success. Compared with a control group of students who did not participate in the mentoring programme, mentored students reported having better professional networks and a better understanding of the benefits and responsibilities of being a member of a professional accounting body. Some support was also found for mentored students having superior understandings of work and career opportunities. As encouraged by The Pathways Commission Report () and the 2015 CPA Australia report Shaping the future of accounting in business education in Australia, the study's findings provide support for how a mentoring programme like the one described in this paper can assist with showcasing the wider purposes and career opportunities associated with the accounting profession, as well as forge closer linkages between accounting practitioners and accounting educators and better integration of accounting practice into accounting curricula.