Abstract

Marketing educators realize business schools need to maintain a level of practitioner relevance in order to attract students to their major.  In other words, the skills and competencies learned by marketing majors need to match the skills and competencies desired by industry.  This exploratory research seeks to compare skill-set perceptions between students, marketing educators, and marketing practitioners.

Introduction

The transition from an academic structure to the demands of the working world is often confusing if not traumatic.  Hiring firms see their personnel decisions as an expensive investment in recruiting, selecting, and training new employees.  For students, at the end of a process requiring years of dedication and often sacrifice, the job-search scenario represents the culmination of a significant long-term goal.  For educators, this process reflects a need to understand both the employers’ and the students’ perception of the process and the skills desired by hiring firms (Tomkovick, Erffmeyer and Hietpas 1996).

Universities that produce students with viable marketplace skills hold an advantage over their competition.  Business academicians with shrinking department budgets and larger class sizes due to increased enrollment must strive to meet the needs and wants of their two primary target markets – the business community and the students (Borin and Watkins 1998).

As marketing educators, we acknowledge ourselves to be accountable to two primary customer groups.  First, we are responsible for providing well-educated and skilled employees for business and organizations in the employer marketplace.  However, we are also responsible to a second group of customers – those students who pay tuition to our institutions to receive the education expected to prepare them for productive and successful careers.  (McCorkle et al. 2003).

This research represents an effort to see if marketing students’ perception of what is desirable in the business world is the same, similar, or completely different from the perception of industry executives/recruiters and marketing educators.  It should be noted that this survey is exploratory in nature and does not intend to imply a causal relationship.  In addition, the author, by necessity, needed to make qualitative judgments on the similarity of responses to the survey instrument.  This research is presented as a vehicle to suggest potential areas of further research and investigation.

This research is based on a preliminary study made in 1997 by a group of authors (Bovinet et al. 1997) with the addition of the educators’ point of view.

Past Research

During the past two decades, a number of research efforts have explored the question of the recruiting and selection process of marketing major graduates.  Authors have focused on identifying the factors used by students when seeking marketing and sales positions (Castleberry 1990; Peterson and Devlin 1994), a list of 50 different attributes relating to the recruiting process (Weilbaker and Merritt 1992), an assessment of students’ attitudes and perceptions toward personal selling as a career (Swenson, Swimyard, Langrehr and Smith 1993), their effectiveness in building relationships (Felson 2001), what skills and abilities are communicated by students’ résumés (Barr and McNeilly 2002), how prepared marketing students are for the job search (McCorkle, Alexander, Reardon and Kling 2003), and teaching marketing students the skills that will make them competitive in the marketplace (Taylor 2003).

Another area of research concentration embraced industry selection decisions.  Specifically, these efforts concentrated on attributes critical to business students (Hafer and Hoth 1981), attributes critical to marketing students (Ursic & Hegstrom 1985; Boatwright and Stamps 1988), attribute ratings compiled by high-level executives (Goldgehn 1989; Kelley and Gaideke 1990; McDaniel and White 1993; Borin and Waktins 1998), agreement between practitioners and educators concerning the content of marketing research courses (Stern and Tseng 2002), using employer input to assess marketing education effectiveness (Ellen and Pilling 2002), and preparing marketing students for constantly changing business landscapes (Ackerman, Gross and Perner 2003).

The findings from previous research have allowed educators to focus on the attributes and skills desired by recruiters and executive decision makers in the job marketplace.  These are the skills and abilities they would like to see marketing majors bring with them to the employment scene.  However, education is often a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Students tend to learn and retain what they think is important (selective comprehension and selective retention).  Therefore, an important question would be to find out if the students’ perceptions of the skills and abilities they will need for the working world match what recruiters and executives desire and what educators are providing.

Background

Chonko and Roberts (1996) wrote a research paper detailing a specific business course and its attending structure.  This course was developed in answer to concerns expressed by the business community in an earlier study (Chonko and Caballero, 1991) (these comments are not in any specific order):

1. Business graduates do not perform adequately in the areas of oral and written communication.

2. Business school curricula are falling farther behind in including new technologies, production methods, global competition strategies, and the like.

3. Business school curricula are too “tools oriented” at the expense of qualitative thinking.

4. Business school graduates are not people-sensitive and therefore find it difficult to get along with others who have different needs, goals, and work styles.

5. Business school faculty members do too little research and that which is done fails the test of relevance and applicability to management.

6. Business school graduates do not know how to recognize common themes in business situations.

7. Business school graduates have not learned how to see the relationships among things that seem very different.

8. Business school graduates cannot tolerate ambiguity and bring order out of seeming confusion.

9. Business school graduates are not capable of the type of thinking that comes from the many ways to look at the world.

In short, potential employers would like to see these skills and competencies be foremost in a student’s skill set:

1. Critical thinking

2. Cross-functional competence

3. Communication skills

4. Global and cultural awareness

5. Full competence in a discipline

6. Technological competence.

The Chonko and Caballero (1991) study focused on a more generalized perception of business undergraduates’ skills.  In reality, for a majority of marketing students, their first entry-level position is usually in sales or customer service (College Placement Council 2001).  A study by Tomkovick, Erffmeyer and Hietpas (1996) posits that entry-level sales candidates need to be aware of specific attributes recruiters are looking for in graduates.  They presented fourteen variables and asked both a recruiter (industry) group and a student group to rate the characteristics from most important to least important (the exact methodological procedure is available in the article).  The final attribute list and corresponding Beta values are listed below (rankings of each response in parentheses):
 

In this survey, the students accurately predicted the skills that could be important to the recruiters, even nailing four out of the first five (otherwise obviously hoping that a modicum of sincerity would make up for any perceived deficiencies).  While studying these results, the author wondered if the results would be similar if the students were not prompted; e.g., given a list of static responses and then asked to rate them.

Methodology

Business students at six small- to medium-size liberal arts colleges were surveyed for this research.  They were instructed to take out a piece of paper and write down the answers to the following question:

In your opinion, what are the three most important skills (no order necessary) a marketing major should develop in college to facilitate their initial performance in the working world?

The question was posed in upper-level marketing classes during the fall terms of 2001, 2002, and the spring terms of 2003 and 2004.  Most of the students were marketing majors (95%) and the rest were business students of varying majors.  The four surveys yielded 482 usable questionnaires with a total of 1446 usable responses. The first survey yielded 122 usable questionnaires and 367 total responses (usable defined as readable or appropriate).  Over 90% of the participants were juniors, seniors, or graduate students.  No designation as to gender or age was made.  Naturally, some editing of answers was necessary.  Again, the students were not requested to indicate the relative importance of their answers.

In all cases, as much as feasible, the original nature of the student response was retained.  If the response did not fit a specific category, a new category was established.  The students were not aware beforehand that they were going to be asked this question.

Finally, no attempt was made to separate determinant attributes (what skills students think are important) from important attributes (what skills students think will set them apart from other job applicants).  The thrust of this research was to determine whether more detailed investigation into the differences is warranted.

For the marketing educator survey, each page of the Marketing Management Association (MMA) member guidebook for the corresponding year was copied (20 pages of names and work addresses and e-mail addresses).  Every third name was utilized and crossed off until 240 (60 per year) addresses were identified.  The educators were sent an e-mail with the same question (see above) and instructions on how to send the answer back in an e-mail.  The e-mailing produced 39 wrong addresses and 124 usable answers (return rate: 61.7% of correct addresses).  There is some room here for further research on the efficacy of e-mail research vs. standard direct mail.

Using the American Marketing Association’s International Member and Marketing Services Guide, every 10^th name that was a practitioner and not an educator provided an e-mail address until 240 (60 per year) addresses were reached.  Again, the same question was proposed.  Wrong addresses counted for 34 returns, and 111 usable questionnaires were received (return rate of correct addresses: 53.9%).

Table 1: Total Responses