Generic attributes and technical skills, curriculum and employability of accounting graduates: theory of alignment and multiple stakeholder views

This thesis explores the work readiness of Kuwaiti accounting graduates from the perspectives of academics’ views, graduates’ experiences and employers’ expectations. In doing so, I conducted one systematic review and two qualitative empirical studies. The systematic review examines the broad literature on graduate work readiness to identify the main trends and the empirical and theoretical gaps. The first study draws on the constructive alignment theory to examine the alignment of the accounting curriculum components of Kuwaiti universities. This study indicates better alignment in private universities than in public universities and highlights the challenges that academics face in the alignment process. The second study investigates the expectation gap and current liaison between academics and employers to mitigate this gap. The gap is found to be different between private and public university graduates and to vary from the perspective of private and public employers. Further communication and liaison between academics and employers are required to tackle the current challenges, minimise the expectation gap and enhance accounting graduate employability. The thesis ends by discussing the main contributions and introducing an improved constructive alignment model.