The Current Status of Accounting Education and Knowledge and Skills Required for Qatari Market

Abstract

Qatar has seen over the past four decades, a major development in its economy, and this development has led to a direct impact on the accounting education and the role that should be played by educational institutions in the development of the accounting and auditing professions. The objective of this paper is to explore the current status of the accounting education in the State of Qatar and its most important phases. Also, this research presents the results of an exploratory questionnaire on the views of respondents on the importance of the knowledge and skills required by accounting graduates. The results of this study revealed that there are challenges and difficulties facing the accounting education in Qatar and the most important issues are: the lack of coordination between the concerned authorities and the low number of accounting graduates. Also, the results indicated that all knowledge and skills are perceived to be important or very important and the respondents ranked professional ethics and critical thinking as the most important knowledge and skills. However, they considered dealing with insurance applications the least important skill. In addition, the results revealed that there are some statistically significant differences between the respondents (in terms of their current occupation, type of organization and graduation year) regarding how they view the importance of these skills and knowledge.