Abstract:

Facing the challenges of the future society, education is an indispensable mechanism for humanity to progress towards the ideals of freedom, peace and social justice. Educational systems must respond to the multiple challenges they face, through the continuous enrichment of knowledge.

For decades, there has been a tendency in the educational field about the development of individuals' capacities, such as learning to learn, learning to do (skills), learning to be (values) and learning to live together. Also, educational paradigms have based their tendencies towards the development of competences. At the international level, the need to train suitable individuals with the necessary competences for the autonomous resolution of problems in the academic and labor fields is increased.

The University of Veracruz began in 1999 the implementation of the Integral and Flexible Educational Model (MEIF), whose bases are centered on the integral formation of the student that starts from the idea of developing, balanced and harmoniously, diverse dimensions of the subject that support it its Intellectual, human, social and professional formation, which leads to the students to develop informative and formative educational processes. The informative processes are related to the academic and disciplinary frameworks, while the formative ones involve the development of skills and the integration of values expressed in attitudes.

Objective:
Analyze the challenges of higher education when teaching programs with a competency focus, showing the results of employers' opinions in Veracruz, Mexico, about the skills, attitudes and values that the professionals of the Accounting Department should have.

Development:
For the development of this study, a quantitative methodology was used, which allowed the analysis of the results obtained from a survey applied to employers, whose activity is carried out in the municipality of Veracruz, Mexico. The results are based mainly on their opinion on the skills and values that must prevail in the professionals of the Accounting for their contracting in companies.

Conclusion:
As a result of this work, it is identified that the entrepreneurs require that the professionals in Accounting, besides the academical knowledge, have the ability to solve problems, leadership, teamwork skills and capacity to work under pressure; these two elements, knowledge and skills, in the same order of importance. Also two values predominated in the results: responsibility and honesty. Therefore, it is considered a challenge for higher education and especially for those institutions that offer educational programs based on competencies, not only focus their attention on knowledge, but also on the development of skills and values within the training and evaluation process.

Keywords:

Challenges, educational systems, skills, competencies, MEIF.