This article investigates the phenomenon of professional identity construction among graduated accounting students. We explore factors that affect the professional identity of these individuals, comparing students in their first higher education course with those who have already completed an undergraduate program. This study emphasizes the significant impact of formal education on shaping professional identity, especially for graduated students. To achieve our main objective, we administered questionnaires in 19 different higher education institutions in Brazil. The literature shows that Brazilian accounting undergraduate courses have a significant number of students who have already completed their first degree and are starting an accounting undergraduate program as a complement or to change their initial career path. In this sense, Brazilian accounting higher education represents a good example to explore this phenomenon. The instrument used to measure the students’ professional identity was developed based on a literature review and contains 18 assertions related to the alignment of students’ intentions and motivations with the accounting career. Participants were asked to rate each statement on a scale from one to ten, indicating their level of agreement. A higher score indicated complete agreement, while a lower score indicated complete disagreement. This approach allowed us to create the Professional Identity Index (PI-Index). The instrument was pretested and approved by an Ethical Committee. Our sample consisted of 242 participants who completed the questionnaires. Of these, 52 (21.5%) are students who had completed a first degree before starting the accounting undergraduate program, and 190 (78.5%) are students in their first degree. The Cronbach’s alpha for the instrument that measures professional identity was 0.94. The data collected were analyzed using descriptive analyses, nonparametric hypothesis tests, and linear regression. Our main results indicate that the statements related to professional identity were rated highly by both first-degree and graduated students. However, students pursuing their first degree generally attributed numerically higher scores to almost all 18 statements of accounting professional identity. Nevertheless, considering the significance of the Wilcoxon nonparametric test, it was noted that nine of these 18 statements were statistically different at 1%, 5%, or 10% levels. Additionally, the PI-Index showed differences at the 5% level between the groups, indicating that the mean and median scores for graduated students were lower. This finding is also consistent with the linear regression results estimated in this research. The findings of this study are important for professors, academic managers, and policymakers who are concerned with the development of professional identity among higher education students. This phenomenon is relevant for the future performance of higher education students in their chosen careers, as students with a lower level of professional identity tend to abandon their careers after completing the course or work in the field without motivation to develop themselves in the area.

Keywords: Professional identity, graduated students, second degree, higher education.