Comparison of College Faculty and Business Professionals as Evaluators of Student Business Letters

This article reports on assessments of business letters assigned to students in a business communication course. Assessments were performed by faculty in other disciplines and local business professionals, with each sampled assignment evaluated by one faculty and one business professional. Overall, the assessments by the two groups were similar in terms of evaluation items related to quality of content and organization. However, faculty evaluators rated the letters lower on items related to mechanics, while business professional evaluators rated the letters lower on items related to professionalism. The paired assessments revealed only limited consistency between the two evaluator groups.

Insurance for Social Media Liability

Whether a claim involves “bodily injury” or “property damage” is a threshold issue for coverage under Coverage A of the standard comprehensive general liability (CGL) policy and homeowners policy. Social media-related claims that allege pure emotional distress, without corresponding physical manifestations, or that allege damage to intangible property, such as intellectual property rights, may not fall within the insuring agreements of these policies. Social media claims often allege intentional conduct, if not intentional harm, which raises the threshold issue of whether the claim alleges an “occurrence” such that coverage is triggered. To the extent a social media claim falls within the policies’ insuring agreements, the next issue is whether the policies contain exclusions that might apply. Exclusions for expected or intended injury, employer’s liability, and electronic data may limit coverage for social media claims. Likewise, exclusions in homeowners policies for “bodily injury” or “property damage” arising from a home business, professional services, or physical or mental abuse may apply to common social media claims.

Relevance and meaningfulness: Student perspectives on the highly talented international business professional profile

Competencies deemed relevant and meaningful by international business professionals and implemented in IB education, still do not produce work-ready graduates. This may be because these competencies are not perceived as relevant or meaningful by students. This study was conducted to gain students’ perspectives on the relevance and meaningfulness of the HTIBP talent competency framework, and how they perceived working with it. Results show that the five competency domains of the HTIBP competency framework are perceived as relevant and meaningful by students, in alignment with the professional field, this was not the case for few associated items (behaviours) ‘showing entrepreneurship’ and ‘improving ideas from others’. The lack of clarity of these behaviours resulted in less experienced relevance and meaningfulness by students. Our findings will help educators to better facilitate students to understand the meaning and relevance of competencies. This may help to improve alignment with the professional field.

The power of community in the business professional to academic transition

Recent trends have made the transition from business professional to academic increasingly popular as a move to a second career. This article offers a personal perspective on a critical component of a successful transition—the fruitful leveraging of different university communities. The recommendations are in line with studies showing the importance of relationship variables to nontenure track faculty. The article also supports researchers who strive to create a stronger relationship between business and higher education institutions. The roles of departmental faculty mentors, faculty and administration in the larger university community, the student body community, and nonprofit organizations are discussed.