Working in teams: improving the team experience

IES 3 Professional Skills, issued by the International Federation of Accountants in 2003, lists five essential skills that professional accountants need to acquire: intellectual, technical and functional, personal, interpersonal and communication, and organisational and business management skills. In education programmes, accounting students may be required to work in teams and may therefore acquire some of these skills through the team experience. IES 8, Competence requirements for audit professionals, includes “working in teams effectively” and “presenting, discussing, and defending views effectively through formal, informal, written, and spoken communication” as part of the skills requirement which should be included in the education and development programme for audit professionals. Working in teams, or cooperative learning, is a teaching technique used in the formal education phase, which enables students to acquire some of these skills. The paper uses the results of a questionnaire survey to investigate how teams function in an accounting project. Although the results indicate that skills such as meeting management and interpersonal skills have a positive effect on the students’ satisfaction with the team, no link could be found to the students’ project mark. These results suggest that skills such as meeting management and interpersonal skills, if included in the formal education phase, may contribute positively to students’ career preparedness. The study also found that students did not consider peer assessment appropriate.