“Can I use what I learnt at work?” Accounting education-practice gap

Approaching graduation, the first question for every student is “Will I be able to find a job?” If they find a job, the next question will properly be “Can I perform well at work” This research investigated whether students can use what they have learned when they start work, whether there is a gap, and what gap exists between accounting education and the requirements of practice. This study aims to identify the gap of expectation, skill obtained and skills required between student and practitioners’ point of view. This will provide information to students on what areas should they be paying attention to during study, and inform educators on where gaps exist, and brief employers on areas a graduate of accounting education may lack, so focused training can be provided. A questionnaire was designed using free survey tool Qualtrics. Questions were adapted from four different sources. The survey was sent to a Wintec CBITE accounting tutor. With their consent and permission, the survey link was posted onto a Moodle page to share with Wintec CBITE students. The researcher then collected data though Qualtrics. Analysis was done though Excel. A table was created for each question. Some answers were modified to match the literature’s format of presenting their result to show a fairer and equal comparison. The researcher received a total of 26 responses.,20 of which were from accounting major students. However, only 15 out of the 20 had completed the whole questionnaire. Comparison of the results gained from this study contrast with the literature. Conclusions and recommendations are still to be made

“Can I use what I learnt at work?” Accounting education-practice gap

Approaching graduation, the first question for every student is “Will I be able to find a job?” If they find a job, the next question will properly be “Can I perform well at work” This research investigated whether students can use what they have learned when they start work, whether there is a gap, and what gap exists between accounting education and the requirements of practice. This study aims to identify the gap of expectation, skill obtained and skills required between student and practitioners’ point of view. This will provide information to students on what areas should they be paying attention to during study, and inform educators on where gaps exist, and brief employers on areas a graduate of accounting education may lack, so focused training can be provided. A questionnaire was designed using free survey tool Qualtrics. Questions were adapted from four different sources. The survey was sent to a Wintec CBITE accounting tutor. With their consent and permission, the survey link was posted onto a Moodle page to share with Wintec CBITE students. The researcher then collected data though Qualtrics. Analysis was done though Excel. A table was created for each question. Some answers were modified to match the literature’s format of presenting their result to show a fairer and equal comparison. The researcher received a total of 26 responses.,20 of which were from accounting major students. However, only 15 out of the 20 had completed the whole questionnaire. Comparison of the results gained from this study contrast with the literature. Conclusions and recommendations are still to be made

Sufficient dimension reduction based on an ensemble of minimum average variance estimators

We introduce a class of dimension reduction estimators based on an ensemble of the minimum average variance estimates of functions that characterize the central subspace, such as the characteristic functions, the Box--Cox transformations and wavelet basis. The ensemble estimators exhaustively estimate the central subspace without imposing restrictive conditions on the predictors, and have the same convergence rate as the minimum average variance estimates. They are flexible and easy to implement, and allow repeated use of the available sample, which enhances accuracy. They are applicable to both univariate and multivariate responses in a unified form. We establish the consistency and convergence rate of these estimators, and the consistency of a cross validation criterion for order determination. We compare the ensemble estimators with other estimators in a wide variety of models, and establish their competent performance.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOS950 the Annals of Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aos/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org