The TEACH-model: Incorporating Practice in Purely Theoretical Commerce Courses

When at university, students are exposed to organised instruction that should prepare them to adapt to a different environment after graduation. A work environment (Awang-Hashim et el., 2023:205-207). Unfortunately, the correlation between education and job performance is weak (Oraison, Konjarski & Howe, 2019:173-174; Lauder & Mayhew, 2020:4,7). Employers struggle to find newly graduated employees with problem solving, communication, collaboration, reasoning and analytical skills that can offer good customer service, analyse information and be adaptable and entrepreneurial (Gholam, 2019:115). In addition, these newly graduated employees sometimes also lack the ability to lead, innovative, design, criticise and make decisions considering facts (Abdul & Al-Asadi, 2021:1-3). To reduce the problematic correlation, marketing and commerce students should graduate with a qualification that develop and test both knowledge and skills and competencies (Ma'dan, Imail & Daud, 2020:137-142). To ensure this the marketing lecturer developed and implemented a process that involved three projects over three years to three different cohorts of marketing students that study towards a Bachelor of Commerce degree. The three projects involved an interactive study hall where students helped and motivated fellow marketing students, of a different course, to learn for a test using games and group work. The second was hosting a vegetable expo to create awareness of healthy eating habits across campus. The third was hosting an art exhibition where artwork depicted problems students face while at university and solutions. The findings show how the incorporation of the theory with the three projects reduced the correlation by means of a new teaching model proposed by the lecturer: The TEACH-model. Keywords: Commerce education, industry readiness, marketing education, practical education, TEACH-model.