Abstract
This study emphasises the importance of business community feedback in the process of business curriculum design. In the turbulent business environment, higher education institutions must regularly evaluate and update their curriculum to respond to the emerging business needs. Focus group interviews with representatives from the business community are used to explore possibilities for the improvement of the business curriculum. Moreover, the study analyses the mismatch between graduates’ competencies and business community needs and requirements. Our results suggest that employing focus group interviews is a valuable method of gaining more insight into relationships between business community expectations and academic community approach to the processes of curriculum design and teaching. A set of guidelines is provided for the effective conduct of focus group interviews as part of the business curriculum development in the higher education. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n13p229
Highlights
The creation and transmission of knowledge are two main functions of higher education system
We organized a focus group composed of 12 relevant representatives of employers, with the assumption that many competencies that students should acquire by the end of their study and that would facilitate the transition to the business environment do not serve the needs of the labor market
One of the key problems in the process of testing a candidate for the job is related to the personal characteristics of graduates and with their inability to cope with stressful situations and set requirements due to lack of necessary expertise
Summary
The creation and transmission of knowledge are two main functions of higher education system. To sustain the highly competitive market, higher education institutions (HEIs) must regularly evaluate and update their curriculum. According to Tam (2014), international trends in higher education show a shift away from the faculty-oriented model towards learningbased model that focuses on what students know and can do. Reputable and successful HEIs are putting the professional competencies and employability of graduates in the center of the higher-education transformation process. According to the Croatian Employment Service, the registered unemployment rate was 20.2% in 2013 (Bariü, 2014). The rate of unemployment of people with higher-education degree ranged between 5.1% (for the graduates from the first Bologna cycle) and 6.4% (for the second and third cycle graduates). The highest increase in unemployment rate was recorded for people with bachelor’s degree, which increased by 14.9% in the last year
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