The Misalignment of Oral Communication Competencies in Business Curricula: Employers Prioritize Listening, but Business Schools are Not Listening

Research indicates that listening skills are highly important to possess in employment. This seems especially true for recent business school graduates. Yet, business program learning goals prioritize other communication skills over listening. The purpose of this study is to extend the scope of past research to curriculum. Namely, we examine whether oral communication (OC) skills that are emphasized in undergraduate course descriptions, course learning objectives, and course grading schemes are aligned with the needs of employers. Our results across all three sources of curricular data show the same pattern of misalignment in OC priorities that was found a decade ago for program learning goals. That is, even though employers value listening more than conversing, and conversing more than presenting, business schools emphasize these OC skills in the opposite priority in their curricula. This misalignment in OC priorities was detected across academic institutions and programs (e.g. public and private universities; ranked and unranked programs). Plausible explanations for this continued misalignment and recommendations for correcting curricular misalignment and elevating listening as a priority are put forth.