Working with business and industry to enhance curriculum development and student employability

Abstract

This chapter is a case study of how one institution worked with internal and external constituents to support student employability. The Graduate School of Business at Copenhagen Business School (CBS), working through curriculum development and a communications plan, has embedded employability both pedagogically and practically into a complex set of interrelated programs of study. The lessons that faculty and staff of CBS have learned may be helpful to other academic departments that seek to appropriately tie their curricula to industry needs. It is not intended as a best practice per se, but rather as "a practice"-a description of implemented and intended activities leading to an overriding goal: establishment of a qualifications framework relying on continuous curriculum development to support student employability.The very process of creating a qualifications framework has induced a healthy discussion on curriculum development across the college, mainly because it is devoted to the future expected practice for our graduates. In particular, we focus on the Graduate School of Business (GSB), which encompasses the master of science (M.Sc.) and master of arts (M.A.) programs. GSB was initially established as an integrated part of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration with the aim of strengthening coordination of the development of curricula, pedagogical principles, evaluation policies and marketing of M.Sc. programs in economics, business administration, and related areas. (In Denmark, as in much of Europe, it is traditional for students to take master's courses during their studies rather than All fifteen lines of the M.Sc. program in economics and business administration constitute a progression on top of the B.Sc. degree. Students acquire the generalist qualifications at the B.Sc. level on which the M.Sc. program builds, providing a specialist qualification within one of the fifteen options. Structured in this way, the B.Sc. and M.Sc. programs result in generalist and specialist qualifications during a five-year period.The specialist qualifications are ensured by the various lines in the first year of the study and the final master's thesis in the fourth semester. During the third semester, the students are free to make a choice when taking electives and can opt to broaden their scope into other areas within economics and business administration, or they can strengthen their qualifications within their field of specialization. This progression within the specialization is, in some lines, afforded by line specific progression courses. Pedagogy at GSBEven though the details of pedagogy differ among the lines-mainly because of didactic elements in different thematic fields-some commonalities build on the shared pedagogical principles of CBS. To take an example, one can compare the line Human Resource Management (HRM) with Applied Economics and Finance (AEF). In HRM, the conceptual focus is on the human being as learning individual, resulting in a pedagogical approach where the process is more import...

Achieving graduate employability through consensus in the South Pacific island nation

“…Given the support for the findings of this study with important studies in other cultural contexts (Mason et al, 2003;Junghagen, 2005;Harvey, 2005;Yorke and Harvey, 2005) it is important that the PNG Unitech attend to these findings in a positive and constructive manner in designing and conducting their undergraduate business programmes in manner conducive to the expectations of both students and employers. Importantly, the skills and personal attributes required for graduate "employability" identified here are further acknowledged within a different cultural and economic context.…”

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