A Parsimonious Instrument for Predicting Students’ Intent to Pursue a Sales Career

Abstract

Students' desire and intention to pursue a career in sales continue to lag behind industry demand for sales professionals. This article develops and validates a reliable and parsimonious scale for measuring and predicting student intention to pursue a selling career. The instrument advances previous scales in three ways. The instrument is generalizable across academic settings and is shown to be sensitive to differences across varied course coverage and learning activities. The instrument is parsimonious and offers a high reliability coefficient. Finally, the instrument is validated both before and after exposure to a sales module, thus capturing perceptual and attitudinal changes as students become more familiar with this career option.

Corporate-Academic Partnerships: Creating a Win-Win in the Classroom

“…The original authors (Peltier et al, 2014) reported factor loadings of .72-.83 for this measure, with a reliability coefficient of .89. The results provide additional evidence of the factor structure and dimension reliability, with factor loadings of .68-.84 and an alpha coefficient of .90.…”

“…One dimension of the Intent to Pursue a Sales Career (ITPSC) Scale (Peltier, Cummins, Pomirleanu, Cross, & Simon, 2014) was used to assess potential changes in students' perceptions as a result of the experiential learning project: sales knowledge. This dimension was chosen because it facilitates a self-report assessment of the students' development of selling skills.…”

“…In developing the ITPSC Scale, Peltier et al (2014) found that students' scores increased significantly after an educational intervention in which guest speakers in a Principles of Marketing class covered sales-related content. Similarly, I hypothesized that students' scores on sales knowledge would increase significantly at the end of the sales management experiential learning project, as compared to scores reported before the project started.…”

“…Several students mentioned the value of doing something outside their comfort zones. Another Note: All items from the Intent to Pursue a Sales Career (ITPSC) Scale (Peltier et al, 2014). λ D standardized factor loading.…”

Examining Students’ Feelings and Perceptions of Accounting Profession in a Developing Country: The Role of Gender and Student Category

“…Feelings about a profession include feelings that the profession is interesting, has a sense of accomplishment, good and worthwhile and providing a kind of emotional and financial security (Karakaya et al, 2011;Peltier, Cummins, Pomirleanu, Cross, & Simon, 2014;Wessels & Steenkamp, 2009). Negative feelings for the accounting profession can be formed throughout life and can affect interest for the profession.…”