Study on the Current Status and Challenges Encountered in Preparing Thai Accounting Students for ASEAN in the Vocational Education Stream

Abstract

The member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) signed a Mutual Recognition Arrangement (MRA) Framework on Accountancy Services in 2009 for the region to enjoy labor mobility of accounting professions. Thailand as one of the members has been tremendously affected, especially in the education sector that is responsible for the labor preparation. Yet, most studies conducted to date put little emphasis on statuses and challenges of the sector in preparing the future ASEAN workforce so as to respond to the provided opportunity. Specifically, vocational education, which its claimed advantage is to connect labor to the labor market, was altogether neglected. The study was conducted using multiple in-depth interviews with main stakeholders in the vocational education stream in 3 layers so as to triangulate and attain comprehensive information: (i) Office of Vocational Education Commission (OVEC) as a national level; (ii) ‘Best Practice’ vocational colleges in Bangkok and the Northeast as an institutional level and (iii) Market perception as an industrial sector. The data were collected by a documentary study, in-depth interviews and focus group discussions with 24 respondents in total. The result revealed that (i) at the national level, the preparation in the vocational education stream could not adequately prepare vocational accounting students to enter ASEAN confidently. Even though English preparation and employment security were OVEC’s strategic preparations, they took for granted the benefit of MRA; (ii) at the institutional level, the challenges were not location-based but system-based; and (iii) at the market level, despite the career positions that did not require BA graduates’ skills and knowledge, the market preferred vocational graduates in secondary to the general education ones. Based on the study, OVEC is suggested to improve these 5 areas of implementation as follows: (i) Policy should focus on incentive building to call in younger generations of instructors to the stream and close interaction with the industrial sector, especially at the ASEAN level; (ii) Curriculum should be reviewed and updated on a regular basis and should be ASEAN-centric rather than Thai-centric; (iii) Instructor development should be short-term and long-term on a regular basis; (iv) Student development should be career-specific in order to make MRA in Accountancy Services more meaningful to the Thai context and (v) Vocational Qualification Framework should be developed by close collaboration with the Federation of Accounting Professions (FAP) and Thailand Professional Qualification Institute (TPQI).