Annotated Bibliography

ARTICLE 1

Annotated Bibliography

Azevedo, Ana., Gerhard Apfelthaler, and Deborah Hurst. 2012. “Competency Development In Business Graduates: An Industry-driven approach for examining the alignment of Undergraduate Business Education with Industry requirements.” The International Journal of Management Education. 10: 12-28. DOI:10.1016/j.ijme.2012.02.002

The article examines how valuable, relevant and capable the competencies of business graduates are for future career and employability. The author’s research focuses on competencies such as 1) influencing and persuading, 2) teamwork and relationship building, 3) critical and analytical thinking, 4) self and time management, 5) leadership, 6) ability to see the bigger picture, 7) presentation

The article points out that the technical skills solely are not enough for today’s global marketplace. The author selected 530 Alabama Business Educators, out of which 28% (149) were accounted for survey to draw the conclusion. The quantitative research article summarised the findings and stated that Alabama Business Educators considers that the soft skills are important area of business education curriculum. However, Educators’ perceptions toward importance of soft skills for twenty-first century’s workforce were influenced by the location of the school than by the background of the Educators. The limitations of the article are the survey focused on the perceptions of the business Educators, not the business graduates or the students. The article can be useful to contrast the perceptions of business educators and the students on how they consider the importance of soft skills in twenty-first century’s

The main ideas expressed are with the contextualized employability skills, employees will be getting better payoff on long term basis. The customized skills training will enable the workers to achieve the organisational goal as the employability skills are made more contexts bound and specific to the organizational and operating environment. The limitation of the article is it is hard to recognise the employability skills unless the relation between work context and expected skills are realised. Therefore the article can be used to further research the relation of various employability skills in different work