On the Effective Use of Public Sector Expertise: Or Why the Use of outside Consultants Often Leads to the Waste of In-House Skills

Kline, Elliot H.; Buntz, C. Gregory

doi:10.2307/975943

Cited by 26 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…45-46). This early positive view of the use of consultants has been supplanted by more cynical uses: some executives hire consultants to fire them, giving executives a ready-made scapegoat (Semadeni & Krause, 2011); other executives engage in opinion-shopping, particularly if they are hunting for more favorable compensation packages for CEOs and executives (Goh & Gupta, 2010); and others argue that external consultants waste internal expertise (Kline & Buntz, 1979). Like the U.S. Air Force, we found that we needed to transfer the expertise of an outside consultant into our school, since we did not employ a trained ethicist among our faculty.…”

Section: Reaching Out To Expertsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Concrete Steps for Assessing the “Soft Skills” in an MBA Program

Ingols

Shapiro

2013

Journal of Management Education

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In 2006, our School of Management began the serious path of assessing both the "hard skills" (such as accounting, finance, and strategy) and the "soft skills" (such as leadership, team work, and ethics) of our MBA Program. The data generated from examining the "soft skills" that we want students to learn within our Organization Behavior courses quickly noted performance gaps between what the faculty hoped our students were learning and what students demonstrated that they knew. In this article, we will describe our assessment methods in detail, exploring three methods of assessment that we developed to assess "soft skills", specifically: using a commercially available 360-degree instrument, building our own instrument based on well-established theory, and reaching out to experts. We share how we transformed various course-embedded deliverables into useable data and how we "closed the loop" and changed the curriculum within our MBA Program. We provide processes and instruments that could be used by other institutions struggling to make measureable (assessable and actionable) any of their own soft-skill MBA competencies.

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Section: Reaching Out To Expertsmentioning

confidence: 99%