The Financial Professional’s Toolbox – the on-going development of a generic skills unit to meet the needs of accounting students – with stakeholder engagement.

In common with other business schools the Portsmouth Business School, in response to the Dearing Report (1997) introduced generic skills unit for all Business School Undergraduate in October 2003. This unit gave a useful grounding in essential IT skills and referencing but students criticised the unit for lacking reference to the actual degree subjects they were studying, and, that it lacked focus. This paper considers the development of a redesigned year one generic skills unit specifically for Accounting undergraduates at the University of Portsmouth. It discusses the reasons why it was considered necessary to replace the pre-existing offering and the process that was followed in order to develop the new unit in particular the involvement of the three stakeholder groups: employers, students and staff. The resultant unit, which was delivered for the first time in the academic year 2006/7, is then reviewed using student as well as lecturer feedback and evaluated against its overall design objectives.