Abstract:

The lack of time is a problem of contemporary society. The effective time management to ensure a healthy balance between professional, family and personal life is a permanent problem in occupations with high responsibility (Doolittle et al., 2013; Johari et al., 2018). Due to the diversity of obligations to which they need to comply and the constant list of tasks to fulfil., accountant is one of the professions where the problem of time management is more worrying due to the danger of psychological disorders, such as burnout (Forgarty, 2000; Peixoto, 2018).

Therefore, there is a gap on the training of the accounting student for soft skills, such as time management. This gap is becoming more acute with the entry of the profession into the digital age (known in this scope as accounting 4.0 and accounting 5.0). It is essential that time management becomes one of the new soft skills of the curricula of accounting degrees International, as well as in the lifelong training of active professionals (Kermis & Kermis, 2010; Maelah et al, 2012; Dolce et al, 2020). However, considering the dimension of this problem in the context of the development of accountants' profession, is, also, essential the creation of a time management software, that helps accountants to adapt the theoretical knowledge of time management to the specificity of their work.

The methodology of this research relies on two separate analyses. The first is a theoretical analysis based on the literature review of the Portuguese (CNC, 2022) and European legal regime of accounting (UE, 2022), new tendencies of Technology, Information, Communication and Electronics (TICE) and, also, on the higher education teaching strategies. The second is an empirical analysis based on experimental developed on the curricular unit of the Interaction Lab II on the Multimedia Communication degree to promotes real-life practices and encourage new the students’ skills.

The results present an innovative proposal, with an interventionist perspective in the university environment, seeks to expand the accounting work within society, allowing students to apply in practice the theoretical knowledge studied in academia and develop real case practices. This educational experience inside different subjects of the under degree (accounting, informatics, and multimedia communication) and master’s degree (accounting and management) represent new trends in higher education while give knowledge, promote new skills (soft and hard) and wisdom to enjoy their work.

Keywords:

Accounting, Time Management, TICE, m-learning, New Trends/Experiences.