From Classroom to Boardroom: Employer Perspectives of Business Graduates’ Information Literacy Skills

Information literacy includes the ability to locate, use, and manage information. While many libraries and academic programs incorporate information literacy into undergraduate business instruction and assignments, the linear and ordered nature of the curricula may not prepare students for the ill-structured and ever-changing work environments they will encounter after graduation. To understand the gaps between the current academic environment and the professional world that our business graduates will enter, we interviewed four employers in a pilot study to examine their expectations and perspectives regarding the abilities of new business hires to find and utilize information in the workplace. All the employers were from large, multi-national companies that hire extensively from our R1 university and other high ranking undergraduate business programs. We used a combination of deductive and inductive qualitative analyses to identify these major themes in the interview transcripts: gathering and using information; evidence and synthesis; using specific types of information; learning; navigating internal systems; satisfaction with new hires; and data. Our findings are useful to us, and potentially to other librarians and instructors at institutions with undergraduate business programs, to integrate into business information literacy instruction in a way which best prepares students for the information work environments they will encounter after graduation.