Accounting and Finance in Context [EFIM10022]
The Practice
The first-year Accounting and Finance in Context unit examines the history and evolving social roles of accounting and finance, focusing on key contemporary issues affecting its nature and potential contribution to fair, sustainable societies. There were 116 students on the unit in 2020/21.
Students are grouped and assigned professional mentors from various fields of accounting and finance. Regular meetings with mentors allow students to develop academic knowledge, gain real world understanding of their subject, and build professionalism. Employability support alongside this supports development of career thinking and employability skills, through:
• Skills audit – A video resource helps students to identify skills and strengths, following which they complete an audit of their transferable skills and include examples of where they have shown these. Students are encouraged to re-visit their audit at the unit end, identifying any changes and recording new experiences.
• Group working technique – An initial recorded lecture on effective group working strategies sets student expectations and allows reflection on effective group work, including its key components. The aim is to enhance the groups’ ability to succeed in their collaborative assessed essay task.
• Reflection – Short video guides help students reflect on their progress throughout the unit, including assessing their contribution to the team and reflecting on their strengths and weaknesses in this regard. At the end of the unit students are asked to set themselves new goals or amend those from the start of the mentoring programme.
Assessment
A collaborative group essay (70%) and individual reflective journal (30%) interweave the unit’s employability and academic outcomes.
Responsibilities
The unit was designed to encompass skill development and exploration of career options, and the unit director has been a driving force in shaping the unit and ensuring its success. Various academics teach individual topics, and the School is responsible for everything associated with learning and teaching – e.g. producing a detailed work plan for students to stay on track with all aspects of the unit, development and delivery of the initial group working support session, and managing group engagement and performance.
The School’s Employability Adviser developed the skills audit and reflection support, joining a live ‘golden hour’ Q&A session with students to support progress towards employability aims and encouraging students to recognise the broader applicability of their learning from the unit.
The Professional Liaison Network (PLN) coordinate the mentoring scheme, including sourcing mentors and encouraging students to complete a Mentoring Log and Planner.
The Impact
The quality of student reflective journals shows the benefit of the unit’s skills development opportunities, as well as the space and time which students are given to reflect. This helps students to make the link between the unit content and their future, to be able to plan more effectively.
Students have also cited enhanced sector knowledge, refined professional ambitions, increased motivation to gain work experience, and improved confidence as being other unit benefits.
Quotes from 2019/2020 reflective journals:
“…my perspective on which skills are important for a career in accounting and finance shifted. Prior to taking part in this unit, I knew that analytical skills were important but had not considered that communication was of equal importance.”
“Before, I believed that I should focus on doing my degree first and think about work later, however, this experience has allowed me to realise that both are as important as each other.”
“It has refined my goals and will allow me to carry out more research into the job role to find out how I can develop my skills more specifically in this area.”
“I always thought I was able to communicate well but now I realise that simply being able to talk about your ideas is not enough for good communication; it involves listening to others’ ideas, letting them develop that idea themselves and then offering any support I can or an opinion.”
Academic perspective
“From its inception, the aim of the Accounting and Finance in Context unit has been to embed employability into our first-year curriculum. We felt that, whilst students had a very general idea that they were interested in a career in accounting and / or finance, they had rarely gone further to explore different aspects of the profession. Working with our Employability Adviser, Kathleen, and the PLN has been a fantastic way to help develop careers awareness and employability skills in our first-year students. We hope the unit also offers our students an opportunity to reflect on their development and plan next steps regarding their future career aspirations.”
Professor Stuart Cooper, lead on Accounting and Finance in Context unit
Next Steps
Accounting and Finance in Context will be developed to include more support on skills reflection and articulation, using the Gibbs reflective cycle. Fewer questions in the skills audit will encourage students to give more in-depth skills examples, and submitting later in the unit will allow students to draw upon a wider range of experience. Given the unit’s success, similar opportunities for extracting and embedding employability in mandatory second year units are being explored in the School.
Contact
• Stuart Cooper, Professor of Accounting, School of Accounting & Finance (stuart.cooper@bristol.ac.uk).
• Kathleen Kruiniger, Employability Adviser for the School of Accounting & Finance (kathleen.kruiniger@bristol.ac.uk).
Case study produced in July 2021.
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