Purpose
Soft skills which are a combination of personal qualities and interpersonal skills that help an employer perform their job are an increasingly important concern to businesses and academia, the purpose of this paper is to determine how students ranked the importance of soft skills and compare their rankings to retailing and tourism management faculty and businesses.
Design/methodology/approach
A cross-sectional survey of students, faculty and industry leaders was conducted using an existing survey instrument validated by Crawford et al. (2011). Faculty who were members of retailing and tourism management professional organizations were solicited to participate in the study. Retailing and tourism management students from the researchers’ university were sent a link to complete the survey. All participants were asked to rank the order of importance of the soft skills and their characteristics.
Findings
Variations in the importance of soft skills were reported between the three groups. Variations in the importance of the soft skills characteristics were also identified between the students, faculty, and industry leaders. While communication was identified as the most important soft skill by all three sample groups, experiences was the least important for students and leadership was the least important for faculty and industry leaders.
Research limitations/implications
A limitation of the study was the variation in the sample sizes between the student, faculty, and industry sample. The strength of this study lies in the ability to provide evidence for the need to compare soft skills research results for retailing and tourism management students. Soft skills are found to be important to all three groups, but differences indicate faculty and industry need to work together to clarify exactly what soft skills students need to successfully compete for employment in the retailing and tourism management field.
Originality/value
As the work world continues to change, employers seek workers who have soft skills that support their knowledge base. While technical skills are a current part of educational curricula, soft skills need to be emphasized at the university level so that students gain expertise that prepare them to be successful in this changing workplace.
The purpose of this study is to compare the decision making styles of Generation Y consumers in a previously planned economy country (Poland) and a country identified as a capitalist market driven country (United States). This study also examined gender and culture as predictors of consumer decision making styles (CDMS). The usability of the Jackson and Lee (2010). CDMS instrument was also analyzed. Data were collected from members of Generation Y in two countries: USA and Poland. The study confirmed the 5-factor solution of Jackson and Lee (2010). The CDMS supported in the study are characterized as enjoyment, shopping aversion, price consciousness, quality consciousness and brand consciousness. The results suggest that CDMS vary between cultures and genders, thus it is essential for marketers and consumer behaviorists to consider them separately. Differences were found between cultures in enjoyment, shopping aversion, price consciousness and quality consciousness CDMS. Genders show divergence between enjoyment, shopping aversion and brand consciousness. Enjoyment, shopping aversion and quality consciousness were found to be significantly different in the combination of country and gender. Implications and recommendations for future research were also discussed.
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