Sustainability accounting education and ESG career readiness among accounting and auditing students in Vietnam

This study examines how students’ perceived exposure to sustainability accounting education is associated with perceived ESG career readiness among accounting and auditing students in Vietnam. Drawing primarily on Social Cognitive Career Theory and self-efficacy theory, the study distinguishes sustainability consciousness, ESG self-efficacy, and ESG career readiness and examines the direct and indirect associations among these constructs. Data were collected through a two-wave observational survey of 487 undergraduate accounting and auditing students from Vietnamese higher education institutions. Partial least squares structural equation modeling was used to assess the measurement and structural models, indirect associations, robustness, and out-of-sample predictive performance. The findings show that sustainability accounting education was positively associated with sustainability consciousness and ESG self-efficacy, while sustainability consciousness was positively associated with ESG self-efficacy. ESG self-efficacy showed the strongest direct association with ESG career readiness. The direct associations of sustainability accounting education and sustainability consciousness with ESG career readiness were not statistically significant once ESG self-efficacy was included in the full mediation model. However, the corresponding indirect associations involving ESG self-efficacy were statistically significant. The indirect association linking sustainability accounting education to ESG career readiness through ESG self-efficacy was slightly larger than the theoretically proposed sequential association involving both sustainability consciousness and ESG self-efficacy, indicating that the sequential route was supported but was not uniquely dominant. The study contributes to sustainability accounting education research by clarifying the distinct roles of perceived educational exposure, sustainability consciousness, task-specific ESG self-efficacy, and perceived career-transition readiness. Because the study is observational and constructs within each wave were measured concurrently, the findings should be interpreted as theoretically grounded associations rather than evidence of a causal sequence.