No abstract

Using questionnaire setting, this study examines the perception of the Malaysian public university students on the accounting career in Malaysia. This study seeks to identify the respondents’ preferred accounting career, their career exposure, the factors perceived to be important for an accountant and the acquisition qualities of an accountant. The results of this study provide interesting responses from the respondents. More respondents prefer to become a public accountant rather than holding a management post. The respondents obtained their career exposure mostly from the professional accounting bodies and the factors perceived to be most important in an accountant are work performance and self confidence. Salary is also one of the factors perceived to be important for an accountant. The respondents also perceived the essential qualities of an accountant are acquired through education. The results of this study provide insights to the bodies of accounting profession, employers and academics on the nature and relative importance of the factors deemed important for the accounting students in their employment decision and their preferences to employment opportunities

Article History

In the late 20th Century and the early part of the 21st Century, the accounting profession has suffered some setback in its image. The recent scandal involving Enron and Arthur Andersen may have an adverse impact on the career choice of accounting students. On the other hand Malaysia needs more accountants to assist the country to achieve developed nation status by year 2020. Therefore, this study is an attempt to determine whether accounting students still prefer to become accountants and to compare the perception of accounting as a career between first semester and final semester accounting undergraduates in Malaysia. One thousand questionnaires were distributed to these two groups of students in all the universities regestered with the Ministry of Education. The valid response rate was 52.7 per cent. The results of this study show a significant difference in career choices between first semester and final semester students. Of the first semester student respondents, 30.3 per cent prefer to be public accountants, whereas only 25.8 per cent of the final semester responsents choose to be public accountants. However, both groups agree that starting salary is an important criterion for choosing accounting as a career and that their university has provided them with adequate knowledge to enable them to join the accounting profession.

This study examines the relationship between liquidity, growth and profitability of non-financial firms listed on the Bursa Malaysia. Specifically, this study examines the relationship between liquidity and growth on profitability for 50 non-financial public listed firms in Malaysia. Using panel data technique on 250 observations across a five-year period, this study shows that liquidity has a strong positive relationship with profitability in terms of return on asset of the firms. However, liquidity in terms of quick ratio has no impact on profitability. This study also shows that firm growth in terms of sales growth has a negative relationship with profitability. However, this study shows that liquidity and growth in general do not influence profitability in terms of return on equity, although the result shows that sustainable growth rate has a positive relationship on profitability. This study highlights the importance of these measures in measuring performance. The findings in this study provide guidelines to the firms on the measures that best to be used in evaluating performance so that appropriate strategies can be adopted to increase performance.