No abstract

Education is still a leeway towards achieving individual’s personal growth as well as professional development. Further and Higher Education (FHE) are even more crucial in accelerating the achievement of these goals. Consequently, graduate students explore endless opportunities to enroll for postgraduate programs, hoping to gain financial independence, economic freedom, and improved standard of living after completion. Since graduate programs offer such tremendous career and life-changing opportunities, it is imperative to investigate if programs like the master’s in business administration are still relevant in today’s fast-moving business environment. This phenomenology study systematically utilizes underlying assumptions of research-based learning to assess a core aspect of universities’ MBA curriculum, that is writing a dissertation. It examines the value added by dissertation to graduates’ long-term career goals. Data for the study was obtained from fourteen MBA graduates through unstructured in-depth interviews. All the graduates currently work as full-time employees in their respective organisations, who were drawn from four main departments namely marketing, education, accounting and the IT industry. Our findings are thought provoking, yet compelling, in the sense that participants expressed mixed opinions concerning whether the dissertation prepared them for their current job roles. Most of them attributed their career successes to luck and hard work. Good communication and leadership skills also played major roles. Only few of them did acknowledge honing such skills while writing their dissertation during the research process. The implication of this research to stakeholders of higher education institutions, and policy makers, are also discussed.

Purpose This paper aims to systematically review the literature on knowledge leakage through social networks in the past decade to find existing gaps, identify potential risk factors while, ultimately, proposing ways of mitigating these factors. Design/methodology/approach This study adopted Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic reviews and Meta-Analysis as guide for searching relevant scholarly publications. Subject-specific and -related research papers were obtained from three databases, namely, Scopus, Web of Science and EBSCOhost. The review data was generated from the search results while adopting specific criteria to either accept or reject a particular publication during the search process. Findings Technological, operational and human knowledge factors are some of the risks resulting from knowledge leakage. Highlights of the paper include strategies for mitigating these factors, including continuous training, creating awareness, banning social media usage at work and reinforcing nondisclosure policies. This study also found potential gaps from the literature, categorized as topical, geographical, industrial, theoretical, methodological and conceptual gaps while proposing ways of addressing these gaps using specific research questions. These questions set the direction for future studies on knowledge leakage and social networks. Originality/value Implications of the findings are laid out, particularly the idea of developing actionable managerial plans for preventing knowledge leakage from occurring in organizations in the first place. The systematic, rigorous, transparent and methodological procedures used throughout the entire research process strongly suggest that the findings and conclusions are legitimate. While the findings were not drawn arbitrarily, they potentially offer windows of opportunities for bridging the six potential gaps identified in this paper.

Universities face a lot of pressures, especially when competing among themselves to recruit a fair number of the student population. To successfully attract, recruit and retain students in such a highly competitive industry sector, these institutions must constantly make improvements to the quality of service they offer to students. Service quality, broadly referred to as "SERVQUAL is a measurement of service quality based on the difference between the customer's expectations of the quality of service he/she will receive, and his or her perceptions of the service received" (Nadiri et al., 2009, p. 531). It addresses students' satisfaction level using various indicators, including tangible and intangible factors. this helps university to know students' expectations levels even as they try to match them with achievable learning outcomes and programs. Universities need to understand students' expectation before enrolling in a MBA program and match such expectations to their perception of the MBA program after they must have successfully completed a particular semester or graduated from the program. The present research is an ongoing, two-phased, Action Research (AR) study of a start-up universitythe American University of Malta (AUM) MBA program. Phase one begins by exploring current students' expectations as they start their MBA join. Since the MBA program at AUM is run consecutively for two years, phase two will map the students' overall expectations to their perception of the program after the first year of study. The research will be done in collaboration with students and professors at the institution.