Bridging the gap between graduates and working professionals: Determining the development of conceptual understanding in international business students

For many occupations, graduates with adequate conceptual understanding are hard to find. There appears to be a growing gap between graduates and working professionals. As a step towards bridging this gap in the international business domain, this cross-sectional study aims to gain insight into the development of students’ conceptual understanding in higher professional education. Participants comprised 74 international business students at the beginning, middle and end-stages of a bachelor degree programme. Students were presented with a business case about the current Dutch retail crisis after which they had one hour to explain important factors, required knowledge, and the problems and dilemmas faced by retail chains struggling to survive. Using an assessment rubric and approach developed and validated in previous studies, conceptual understanding was scored according to relevance and extent of discussion. As expected, beginning-stage students displayed lower conceptual understanding than middle and end-stage students. Beginning-stage students tended to use layman’s terms rather than appropriate business terms, and tended to just replicate details from the provided business case. Middle and end-stage students described, explained and discussed the business case more adequately, partly by applying prior knowledge. However, an unexpected result was that end-stage students who had done an internship did not score significantly higher than middle-stage students who had not. Conceptual understanding appeared to stagnate at a basic level. To bridge the gap between graduates and working professionals, further research needs to establish why advanced conceptual understanding is not reached, and investigate possible interventions educators can use to foster its development.