The Expectation Of Accountant General’s Department Of Malaysia Towards Future Accountants’ Skills

Abstract

Nowadays, employers are expecting capable and competent graduates to be hired in fulfilling organizations’ goals and objectives. Same goes to public sector organization as facing by Accountant General’s Department of Malaysia (AG) in ensuring their future accountants acquired both soft skills and hard skills. Today, future public sector accountants will face more challenging working style since they are being needed to be more effective in enhancinggovernance, accrual accounting, reporting, auditing and overall accounting practices. Thus, the important of skills and knowledge being needed has been explored and discussed in this current research particularly from the perspective of public sector. In this research, five important skills have been identified to be important for future accountants in order to be employable. The skills are team work, time management, problem solving, communication andknowledgeinaccounting theory and practice. Furthermore, most employees fromAG was expected that future accountants must be able to work in group, competent to organize workload in meeting deadlines, able to integrate multidisciplinary knowledge to solve problems, proficient to listen and understand information and able to use data, evaluate risks in solving a real world problems. The findings can assist AG in enhancing and improving the competency of junior and future accountants in early stage of being part of AG through internal or external training. Besides that, the important of every skills perceived by employers can facilitate the future accountants to be prepared prior joining AG as public accountants in any of AG unit. Keywords: Accountant General’s Department (AG), skills, team work, time management, problem solving, communication, knowledge in accounting theory and practice, accountants