Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to explore accountancy students' pre-employment decisions as regards pursuing a career after completing an internship. The paper aims to analyse the mediating effect of aspects of students' training experience in firms as direct/indirect factors which influence their career decisions. Design/methodology/approach: The data were collected from a class after the students had completed internships and analysed using structural equation modelling (SEM). The aim was to establish a model after nesting the second-order confirmatory analysis of the data. The final stage was to analyse multiple mediating factors, such as the type of company (TOC) and the students' opinion of the company. Findings: The interns perceived opportunities for promotion in accounting firms as a long-term advantage over salary and benefits and as a key criterion for pursuing a career in accountancy. The results indicate that person-job (P-J) fit affects students' career choice more than person-organisation (P-O) fit, and that students' negative opinion of the company environment mediates their intention to pursue a career in the firm after graduation. Research limitations/implications: The sample size of 121 students was limited by the number of student intake per year and the study was conducted based on per intake. This may limit the generalisability of the results. Practical implications: The internship coordinators should provide sufficient information to students about the expectations of accounting firms before embarking on them and encourage an open feedback loop when they return from training to improve the internship programmes. Accounting firms, in turn, should prepare comprehensive work schedules that balance out routine administrative work with challenging auditing or tax tasks. These would improve the students' judgement and lead them to better decisions to pursue the career and reduce turnover. Originality/value: This study highlights the importance of the transitional career decisions of graduating students as regards pursuing a career in accountancy, and therefore adds to the second cycle of early employment among college graduates in the vocational literature. It also confirms the mediating factors which indirectly affect students' career decisions and therefore how firms can improve these circumstances for future recruitment. (Contains 11 tables and 2 figures.)