Harmony Between B-School and B-World

Innovation Statement

The Faculty of Management signed an agreement with the second-largest online job posting site in Turkey to conduct content analysis of job advertisements, with the intent to match learning outcomes to the demands of the business world and increase alumni employability.

Call to Action

After graduation, many students are concerned about the future and finding a job. One cause of this anxiety is that they are being educated from a theoretical and academic perspective, which often ignores the needs of the job market during their school tenure. Businesses want to hire alumni who meet industry requirements and have certain qualities and skills. In this context, the most important consideration in overcoming these problems is learning outcomes. The innovation will be useful for designing learning outcomes appropriately to suit the job market. The basic motivation for this innovation, which is identified as a strategic approach to equip the alumni with employability skills, is an expectation of increased business world interest in the business school and the employability of its alumni.

Description

This innovation is based on determining whether the skills and abilities found in job ads posted by businesses match with the qualifications that students gain during their schooling and to eliminate disparities. For this purpose, an agreement has been signed with the second largest online job-posting site operating in Turkey to access a database of approximately 400,000 job advertisements posted between 2008 and 2016.

The researchers focus on job advertisements related to school departments (business administration, human resources management, international trade, management information systems, and health management) within this big data source and analyze them using content analysis and text mining software. Researchers expect to find differences between the learning outcomes of the programs and the skills and abilities demanded by the business world by positions and by the regions. As a result of this analysis, researchers will test whether an employee with skills and abilities needed by the market match with the skills and abilities of alumni. Then, the business school will reorganize its learning and program outputs and make curriculum updates for the next year in order to equip students to meet the demands of business society.

Impact

At the end of the study, these following outputs are expected to be obtained:

• Harmonize learning outcomes of business school disciplines as a consequence of qualifications found in job descriptions  

• Update curriculum in accordance with learning outcomes          

• Support the vocational qualifications needed by authorities and organizations in Turkey by standardizing definitions found in job descriptions as a result of the analysis 

• Make position-oriented suggestions to businesses that post job advertisements in online job sites

• Reveal quality requirements desired in selected provinces        

• Encourage lifelong learning by continuously updating on-demand learning outcomes