Soft skills are crucial in today’s society, as they serve as essential tools for effective communication, everyday organization and job advancement, as acknowledged by employers and students alike (Romanenko et al., 2023) and are vital for thriving in the field of accountancy (Kirstein et al., 2019; Van der Merwe, 2013). Soft skills are also known as transferable generic skills, pervasive skills, fundamental skills, and employability skills (McEwen, 2010). These skills include adapting to change, communicating and working with individuals from diverse personal and cultural backgrounds (Dean, 2017) as well as analytical, problem-solving, critical-thinking, visual, oral, and aural skills (Asonitou and Hassall, 2019; Mohamed and Lashine, 2003).

Employers seek to employ students who possess soft skills such as the ability to work well with others and have excellent communication and leadership skills. Therefore, developing soft skills is a crucial objective for accounting educators (Usoff and Feldmann, 1998). Given that students require more than technical skills to thrive (Aiken et al., 1994; Thompson et al., 2021), these skills alone are insufficient to equip students for the rapidly changing corporate landscape (Lawson et al., 2014).

It has been found that future employers, professional bodies and universities are not always fully aligned in terms of the expectation of what skills newly graduating accountants must have when they start working (Kunz and de Jager, 2019; Steenkamp and Goosen, 2023; Kroon and Alves, 2023; Chandler, 2024) and who is primarily responsible for the development of such skills (Barac and Du Plessis, 2019). Institutions tend to prioritize technical knowledge to an excessive degree, sometimes neglecting the necessary attention to the development of soft skills among accounting professionals, which are essential for securing employment and career advancement (Asonitou and Hassall, 2019; Kavanagh and Drennan, 2008).

To meet the challenges of the working environment, university accounting programs must provide graduates with strong technical knowledge and the essential soft skills to gain employment and make an immediate contribution to a business. The challenge for tertiary educators is to transition from a solely subject-based curriculum to one that is skills-orientated (Iqbal et al., 2023) while still meeting the technical competency required to satisfy future employers and professional bodies. Traditional teaching methods alone (i.e., classroom instruction) do not provide the required results in terms of soft skills development for the work environment (Elo et al., 2024), as such other learning methods need to be integrated (Farashahi and Tajeddin, 2018). Experiential learning theory serves to acquire and improve knowledge through action and doing of which the subsequent reflection of a learner will facilitate lifelong learning and critical thinking (Dewey, 2015; Kolb, 2015; Viviers et al., 2018).

Maelah et al. (2012) identified that the increasing need to develop more than just technical knowledge has led to a response from various higher education institutions across the world, including the necessity for Malaysian accounting graduates to enhance their interpersonal skills. Kermis and Kermis (2010) provide an American perspective by observing that soft skills are also an integral part of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants’ (AICPA) Vision initiative, and that accounting educators have a duty to assist in making students productive members of the professional service team. However, shortcomings in soft skills have been observed among accounting students hailing from Australia, the United Kingdom (Gammie et al., 2002), and South Africa (Barac, 2009).

Usoff and Feldman (1998) argued that despite the importance of soft skills to employers, many students continue to underestimate the importance that employers place on soft skills. Even though various adjustments have been made to accounting education, a gap still remains between the competencies, especially soft skills, that employers expect and perceive accounting graduates to possess (Bui and Porter, 2014; Tan and Laswad, 2018). This is what Bui and Porter (2014) refer to as the ‘accounting education’s expectation-performance gap,’ which includes an expectation gap, a constraints gap, and a performance gap. Other studies have examined this disparity in various contexts from a soft skills perspective. Abayadeera and Watty (2014) examined this disparity among accounting graduates in Sri Lanka, while Webb and Chaffer (2016) analyzed the training of UK accounting graduates for the CIMA professional qualification. According to these studies universities have room to capitalize on additional opportunities for soft skill development (Abayadeera and Watty, 2014; Webb and Chaffer, 2016).

In South Africa professional bodies such as the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA) developed competency frameworks to serve as a guideline to ensure alignment in partnership with universities and employers. SAICA introduced a competency framework for the Associate General Accountant (AGA(SA)) designation in 2021. The AGA(SA) competency framework (competency framework) relates to the entry point in the career of a future AGA(SA). This document builds on the previously developed competency framework for the Chartered Accountant (CA(SA)) designation and is based on a recommendation provided by the International Federation of Accountants (IFAC) of which SAICA is a member (Keevy, 2016; Malan and Van Dyk, 2021).

The AGA(SA) competency framework is divided in three broad categories. The first category is for “Professional Values and Attitudes” which incorporates ethics, citizenship and lifelong learning. The next category, “Enabling competencies” includes business acumen, decision-making and digital acumen, and the last category refers to the “Technical Competencies,” which is not the focus of this study. The questionnaire will focus on “Professional Values and Attitudes” and “Enabling competencies” as per the framework.

The research question is what students’ perceptions are towards to the development of soft skills in a multidisciplinary work-integrated group project. This study therefore aims to analyse the perceived development by students of certain of the competencies or soft skills listed by the framework amongst qualifying AGA(SA) students participating in a group work, interdisciplinary case study through a questionnaire (Creswell and Creswell, 2018). The feedback from the students will provide a unique opportunity to improve future projects that align with the development of the framework while integrating different subjects, specifically catering for the AGA(SA) designation.

A descriptive exploratory design (Malan and van Dyk, 2021) was followed to gain insight into how the case study contributed to the development of the soft skills highlighted by the SAICA AGA(SA) competency framework namely “Professional Values and Attitudes” personal and professional ethics, self-development and adaptability, under “Enabling Competencies” critical thinking, problem solving, judgement and decision-making, communication -, leadership -, people -, relationship-building -, teamwork – and self-management skills, managing others, emotional intelligence and the use of technology (digital acumen). Certain skills were not included in the questionnaire as the project did not lean itself towards its development, for example, automation under digital acumen.

Table 2 provides the descriptive statistical information on the students’ perspectives on soft skills they have developed before the start of the project (section 2 of the questionnaire). The data suggests that students perceive that they have developed skills reasonably well before the project with most of the statements in the questionnaire having a mean of between 3 and 4. The high ratings does point out a possible bias that students will have on their own development of competencies, which is similar to other studies performed (Lew et al., 2010). An interesting observation is the high mean rating for ‘personal and professional ethics’. This suggests that students do believe that ethical behavior and attitudes are well developed through their academic careers. This aligns with emphasis that SAICA has on the importance of ethical behavior within the accounting profession. The importance of ethics from the perspective of students are also supported by Malan and van Dyk (2021).

The descriptive results after the project (section 3 of the questionnaire), which is also illustrated in Table 2 indicates that all of the items in the questionnaire showed improvement based on the student’s perception of the skills developed through the project. The statistical mean on each of the items moved to between 4 and 5 on the scale applied. However, considering ANOVA, only a few of the areas on the questionnaire were considered to be statistically significant, meaning that the p-value is equal to or lower than 0.05. The skills considered to be significant were Critical Thinking (H4), Problem Solving (H5), Communication Skills (H7), Relationship-building Skills (H10), Teamwork skills (H11), Self-management skills (H12), Managing others (H13), and Use of Technology (H15).

Critical thinking (H4) was one of the skills that was significantly developed through the project. Similarly, students believed that the project significantly improved their ability to solve problems (H5). The results align with other studies where cases studies were used to improve critical thinking and problem solving (Viviers et al., 2018).

The requirement to complete the project as a group significantly improved teamwork (H11), communication (H7), relationship building (H10) and management of team members (H13). These skills are also the skills where most significant improvement is observed based on the statistical analysis performed. The findings are also aligned with studies of Van der Merwe (2013) and Steyn et al. (2016) where skills relating to teamwork ranked high. The findings also support the findings of Parsons et al. (2020) that groupwork assists with the development of professional competencies.

Even though the project requires significant groupwork, it also requires students to manage themselves and their own performance within the group setting. Therefore, it is also observed that ‘self-management’ (H12) also had significant improvement based on the analysis. Shauki and Benzie (2017) also identified similar development with oral presentations within a class setting. Furthermore, the skill of self-management is crucial in the workplace and one of the most desired skills from employers employing trainee accountants based on a study performed by Suarta et al. (2023). Finally, the project also significantly improved the students’ ability to use technology (H15). A gap has been noted by employers between the expectations and the ability of graduating students to deal with the fast paced changes in technology (Jackson et al., 2023; Tan and Laswad, 2020). Technology was used in writing reports, doing research and preparing the presentations. Students indicated that there was a noticeable improvement in the use of technology (H15).

The thematic analysis indicated that the skills illustrated in Figure 1 are regarded as crucial for students considering their future careers. The analysis indicated that teamwork is the skill that students have highlighted most frequently based on their perspective on what will be the most important skills in their careers followed by “communication” and “managing others.” Interestingly, these three codes are also very closely aligned since they occurred in proximity of each other as per Figure 2, which indicates that these skills often complement each other or are used in conjunction with each other. This aligns with other studies that indicates the importance of relational skills (Steyn et al., 2016; Van der Merwe, 2013).

Furthermore, the analysis indicated that students considered teamwork was the most important element of the project that contributed to the soft skills being developed. This also supports the results from the descriptive analytics performed, which indicated that “relational skills” increased the most out of the skills assessed. The research element of the project and the presentations in front of a panel were also valuable to enhancing the soft skills assessed.

The most significant challenges faced by students were to manage their groups effectively, including the individual team members in order to meet the deadline for the project. This includes managing the roles and responsibilities, task allocation and differences in opinions and backgrounds as part of reaching a goal. Many students have not responded with a skill used to overcome the challenge, but from the analysis it was deemed that communication, teamwork and managing others were used most frequently to address the challenges regarding effective group work. This also connects with the significant improvement in the relational skills based on the ANOVA test performed. The strong relationships between these skills suggest that they are interdependent and can be developed at the same time.

The findings of previous studies (Crawford et al., 2011; Van der Merwe, 2013) were confirmed, showing that students perceived the work-integrated project to be effective in improving several key soft skills. The student feedback on the work-integrated project aligns with the principles of experiential learning, which emphasize learning through doing (Jonathan and Laik, 2024).

Critical thinking and problem-solving were enhanced as students were required to solve problems that demanded additional research beyond their current technical knowledge base. Although judgment and decision-making were included in the project design by asking students to make recommendations to a “board,” several groups did not incorporate this element into their presentations. This likely explains why students did not report significant improvements in these skills.

The questionnaire was designed to highlight specific soft skills described in the AGA(SA) framework with the use of a Likert Scale. This was followed by a segment of open-ended questions. This approach emphasized the importance of developing soft skills, which are often overlooked by students (Usoff and Feldmann, 1998). The open-ended responses indicated that the answers were highly influenced by the skills listed in the questionnaire and the competency framework, limiting further insights and preventing the emergence of sub-themes. The format of questionnaire aligned with the goals of this project but would not be appropriate in all circumstances.

The development of soft skills is a lifelong learning process and cannot be confined to academia alone (Paisey and Paisey, 2010). Nevertheless, there is an expectation from future employers that universities should take responsibility for fostering these skills (Kirstein et al., 2019). As soft skills continue to develop (Lawson et al., 2014), it is recommended that regular opportunities be created to practice and refine these skills by both universities and future employers. Based on the results of this study, work integrated learning projects provide essential opportunities to develop these soft skills. Particular soft skills that can be developed is critical thinking, problems solving, self-management, time-management and relational skills.

The perceptions of students regarding the development of soft skills were tested, the actual development of these skills was not directly measured. Furthermore, the voluntary nature of the sample introduces potential bias, as participants who chose to participate might have different characteristics than those who did not. However, this ensures compliance with ethical considerations and builds trust with respondents. The study was limited to a single university, which restricts the generalizability of the findings.

The study has made several contributions from a practical and theoretical perspective. Practical implications include the importance of group work to develop interpersonal soft skills that would make a graduate more employable in current working environments. The results point out that case studies that emulate real life companies are an effective tool to use to develop soft skills beyond technical skills within the curriculum. The study makes a theoretical contribution by building on existing knowledge on development of soft skills of accounting students from a developing country perspective.

Even though students were presented with a real-life scenario it is noted that most participants do not have work experience and that their answers were based on their perceptions of what a real-life scenario entails. Independent measurement of the improvement of soft skills was not possible in the use of an anonymous questionnaire, but for this study honest student feedback was required. The use of an identified questionnaire can be considered in future to provide an opportunity for the triangulation of student self-assessments with lecturer evaluations, with the aim to development targeted educational interventions. The study was limited to a single university, which restricts the generalizability of the findings.

Future research can potentially involve employers of the students to obtain an understanding of their perspective of soft skills developed and whether a gap still exists between employer expectations and skills developed throughout tertiary education.