Accounting Faculty and Professional Certifications: Experiences and Perceptions

We survey full-time accounting faculty holding terminal degrees about professional certifications. In addition to asking faculty about professional certifications they hold, we gather data about faculty’s experiences as well as their perceptions about the pursuit of professional certifications. We find significant results for the following items: faculty at non-doctoral schools are more likely to hold professional certifications than their doctoral counterparts; newer faculty are less likely to hold a professional certification, indicating a decreasing trend of accounting faculty who are professionally certified, and faculty teaching audit and taxation are more likely to hold a professional certification, denoting a higher practice credential requirement for faculty teaching in those areas. Our work also reveals faculty’s perceptions about the benefits of obtaining a certification to both teaching and research. By understanding the motivations and obstacles perceived by accounting faculty in their pursuit of professional certifications, universities can design reward systems that best suit their institutional mission while accommodating faculty pursuit of professional certifications in order to bridge the gap between accounting education and accounting practice.