Bridging the Gap Between Marketing Education and the Marketing Profession

Abstract

Professionals and scholars have discussed the unprecedented pace of change currently experienced by businesses. The dynamics facing business today offer rich insight into the challenges facing university graduates. In this chapter, the authors apply a dynamic capabilities (DCs) view of new graduate employability. Dynamic capabilities theory is rooted in the resource-based view that posits organizations create a competitive advantage by acquiring or developing resources that are rare, valuable, and hard to imitate and replace. They argue that employability can be viewed as the complex integration and application of four specific DCs: (1) intelligence resources, (2) personality resources, (3) meta-skill resources, and (4) job-specific resources. The authors view new graduate competitive advantage as dependent on the ability of university graduates to mobilize and exploit the linkages of these resources throughout their university study years. In adopting these resource categories, they build on previous work and propose a conceptual model to evaluate a new graduate's competitive position in an employment marketplace. In this chapter, the authors provide a prescription for how educators and students can apply an integrated dynamic capability view of new graduate employability to support the professional development of marketing students through the development of a comprehensive personal product roadmap.