Abstract Not every student comes to our accounting programs equally ready to meet the academic demands to be placed on them. Some have pre-college educational deficiencies, while others have social backgrounds or current work commitments not matched to preparing for the expectations of traditional professional accounting environments. Accounting educators have heard many calls from both public and industry recruiters for increasing student capabilities in nontechnical aspects of the accounting profession. Responding to these demands may require different curriculum efforts for faculty of those students lacking many of the skills or resources to compete in accounting's aggressive recruiting process. This paper describes one such effort, a project for accounting majors, that incorporates career knowledge, practice in the job search process, team learning and communication skills. Student teams prepare resumes, research a career path, conduct interviews with professionals, write a draft paper, critique other teams' drafts, revise and explain their revisions, and make and review oral presentations. In our program, this project takes place during the second of two intermediate courses to help second-semester juniors prepare earlier for interviewing. Feedback indicates students perceive significant personal improvement in the areas targeted by the project's objectives. Based on this, we call for future research on efforts to tailor the accounting curriculum to a diverse student population.
Sergenian et al. (Fri,) studied this question.