Effective organizational socialization demands soft skill competence. This article advances two goals: (a) explore the inclusion of undergraduate researchers in the scholarship of teaching and learning research and (b) present research findings on employer perceptions of new college graduates’ communication skills. The research team used a rules approach to explore employer perceptions of nonverbal communication skills for new college graduates, such as commonly violated rules. Four key findings relating to rule violations in unspoken communication include displaying a lack of interest, inappropriate attire, body art, and writing deficiencies. Suggestions are offered for including undergraduates in this kind of research.

U.S. undergraduate business communication (BCOM) classes teach students workplace communication fundamentals, but may not build the cross-cultural communication (CCC) skills that learners will need in today’s global workplace. This project surveyed BCOM instructors and students about the importance of including cross-cultural material in BCOM classes. While all instructors considered it at least moderately important to include CCC material, most covered the subject briefly. Students showed interest in receiving CCC training in their BCOM courses but received limited information about it in their classes. Incorporating CCC comprehensively and systematically into BCOM classrooms may help students become competent intercultural communicators.

This case study explores corporate social responsibility (CSR) through the perspective of communication professionals at a large financial services firm. These employees rely on both external communication through formal reporting as well as informal internal communication to understand CSR activities, and tend to describe CSR by what it means within their organization. We find that communication employees perceive that CSR is obligatory, rarely questioned or explained, labeled as “voluntold,” and mainly employed for good press due to its philanthropic focus. We offer theoretical and practical implications that center on making CSR operational, not additive, and ideas for educators teaching CSR.

Search engine optimization (SEO), or the set of practices involved in attaining a high ranking in search engine results, is a web writing skill that requires more attention in business communication pedagogy, because SEO helps businesses attract customers. This article presents the results of interviews with seven SEO experts on SEO best practices and describes how to integrate SEO into business communication courses.

Nearly every business communication textbook includes an explanation of “hard” and “soft” skills. Indeed, most business professionals understand the importance of honing interpersonal competencies as well as technical proficiencies. However, measuring the importance of soft skills and how they are used in an organization is often a difficult task. Therefore, the focus of this article is on rethinking the conversation by applying front-stage and back-stage communication theory to the genres in the case study example of Samsung surrounding its Galaxy Note 7 recall.

Mentoring of graduate students is essential to the professional development of business and professional communication (BPC) scholars; it also helps advance the field of BPC and its disciplinary identity. In this article, a professor and graduate student use a case-study approach incorporating historical/archival data collection and grounded in critical reflection to describe and characterize their own long-term, cross-institutional mentoring relationship. They analyze artifacts from their mentoring experience; discuss benefits and challenges to mentoring in BPC; offer implications for mentees, mentors, and academic programs in creating formal mentoring plans; and suggest topics for further research.

This qualitative study reviewed student application of self-regulated learning (SRL) processes in self-paced graduate business communication courses. It was preceded by a quantitative analysis of the same courses. In both studies, researchers sought to understand student experience in a self-paced learning environment, and how this experience demonstrated SRL and increased student performance. Neither study established a clear connection between a self-paced learning environment, SRL, and student performance. However, both studies confirmed the importance of student predisposition for the cyclical phases of preparation, performance, and appraisal and highlighted the critical role of support in readying students for learning strategy changes.

By means of a cross-cultural virtual teams project involving classrooms in Scotland, Germany, and Portugal, students were exposed to the challenges of collaborating internationally with the intention of increasing their intercultural competency. Intercultural sensitivity and intercultural communication competency were measured using responses to surveys before and after the 6-week project. Students reported, among other aspects, a heightened awareness of the difficulties of intercultural communication. Despite a general appreciation of the project and its outcomes, negative results, such as an increased dislike of intercultural interaction, emerged. Contradictory results warrant further investigation with data from future collaborations.

Two studies investigated the effects of errors in German business letters written by Dutch students. Gaining insight into these effects is important since Germany and the Netherlands are one of the largest economically interdependent partnerships. One hundred and fifty-six German professionals rated letters with errors and letters without errors on comprehensibility, attitude toward text, writer organization, and behavioral intention. Errors negatively affected attitude toward text, writer, and organization. The second study investigated whether pragmatic, syntactical, lexical, and morphological errors elicited different effects on the same variables. Pragmatic and syntactical errors aroused negative effects and, therefore, deserve extra attention in class.

Despite its ubiquity across business contexts, video creation is a rarity in business communication curricula. This article is intended to offer the field of business communication education both a rationale and mechanism by which to better align with modern business communication practice. Part 1 provides a comprehensive demonstration of the pervasive uses of video in business, including statistical evidence, genre examples, and analysis of the medium’s communicative value. Part 2 (and subsequent appendices) then empowers the business communication educator to implement the change suggested in Part 1 by way of a turnkey assignment easily adaptable across business courses.

The demand for writing skills is becoming increasingly prevalent within the U.S. job market. Yet, the biggest barrier to developing successful writing skills, writing apprehension, has received very little attention from scholars in the past 30 years. The present study sought to identify the influence of instructional communicative behaviors on business students’ writing apprehension. Specifically, the study tested a model in which instructors’ immediate behaviors and clarity indirectly influenced students’ writing apprehension through the mediation of perceived immediacy. The data were consistent with the hypothesized model.

Instructors and administrators in business and technical communication (BTC) programs argue that assessment eportfolios can play a vital role in the success of BTC graduates on the job market. This study explores the use of assessment eportfolios by students, alumni, and employers in BTC. Nineteen interviews were conducted and analyzed for common themes and issues in participants’ experiences. The author found that, while the participants did use assessment eportfolios in the job market, their experiences varied widely. These and other findings are discussed, as well as implications of this study for eportfolio pedagogy.

Business communication instructors can improve their own instruction about networking online given further understanding of the gender gap among LinkedIn users. An analysis of the rhetoric of magazine advice articles finds gendered differences in the representation of LinkedIn to readers. Examining how publications talk about LinkedIn leads to guidance on how instructors can discuss LinkedIn and gender in the classroom. The article suggests instructors can modify or create assignments to address potential gender usage patterns.

Data from a survey of 864 executives and managers with hiring authority suggest that business communication has external legitimacy regardless of program sponsorship and that hiring managers favor courses that comprise the business communication curriculum, such as public speaking, leadership, business management, and interpersonal communication. Findings from the study can give students guidance when selecting coursework electives and writing résumés, guide faculty in making curricular and advertising decisions, and support the legitimacy of the business communication curriculum.

In order for students to effectively transfer oral communication skills from academic to professional settings, they must have high oral communication self-efficacy. We significantly increased oral communication self-efficacy in a sample of 97 undergraduate business majors by incorporating enactive mastery, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological arousal into a business communication course. Self-efficacy was positively and significantly correlated with course performance, and increases in self-efficacy were positively and significantly correlated with changes in overall grade point average. By targeting self-efficacy, instructors can improve students’ oral communication skills and help them transfer these skills from academic to professional settings.

Employers provide their interpretation of the meaning of communication skills in this qualitative study of 22 managers. Employers understand written communication to be types of documents, a way to write, and a mode of communication. Oral communication skills mean a style of interacting, presenting, and conducting meetings. Visual communication skills were understood to be data visualization or nonverbal communication. Electronic communication was interpreted as email. The findings contribute to closing-the-gap research by highlighting areas where meaning converges for employers and instructors. Faculty members in communication disciplines can incorporate these findings into their course design and learning outcome discussions.

This study examined the perceptions and expressions of learning of 18 undergraduate students who participated in case study competitions through qualitative inquiry. The participants articulated learning outcomes based on their participation in a case competition, including enhanced communication, critical thinking, and analytical skills; viewing diversity as an educational benefit; and gaining a deeper understanding of business fields such as consulting. These findings suggest case study competitions are a viable tool for business educators to aid students in preparing for competitive work environments.

This study describes how reflections allowed students to express their audience awareness as they wrote a multiaudience messages packet. We present an analysis of 27 reflections in which students described their experience when responding to the various audiences. Students’ reflective depth varied, though deeper reflections demonstrate sophistication in considering audience constraints and values. Students reported difficulty with negative and persuasive messages and indicated concern about their credibility. Reflections can help instructors understand how students are considering audiences for business documents, which instructors can use to improve their instruction and assess how well students consider business audiences.

Previous studies have noted the difficulties students have in understanding and adapting to professional workforce policies, especially mobile device usage and e-etiquette. This study focuses on determining how closely students and working professionals align in their perceptions of appropriate mobile phone usage during business meetings. After comparing the 476 student responses from our survey with a previous study, we found that student and professional perceptions aligned frequently; however, gender, age, and year in school influence student perceptions. The article concludes with suggestions for teaching and future research.

In this article, we present a study focusing on the learning experiences of business students in an organizational and marketing communication course. The pedagogical approaches of a flipped classroom, collaborative inquiry, and communication in the disciplines guided the planning of the course. A mixed-methods approach was used. The key findings include positive student evaluations of the pedagogies utilized. Moreover, a wide variety of learning outcomes was reported, particularly in the fields of crisis communication and workplace communication. The pedagogies utilized enabled a comprehensive model for teaching communication and contributed to relevant learning experiences and skill development for the 21st century.

This article offers readers 13 My Favorite Assignments that were presented at the Association for Business Communication’s 83rd annual conference held in Miami, Florida, in 2018. The teaching innovations offered include assignments that present quick, fun icebreaker exercises; visual communication and diversity; rhetoric; email; and informational interviews. Additional assignment support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on the Association for Business Communication and DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership websites: https://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments and https://salesleadershipcenter.com/research/business-professional-communication-quarterly-my-favorite-assignment

Current literature suggests that students have equal or higher learning outcomes in a “flipped” classroom compared with a traditional lecture. However, there are few robust analyses of the flipped-class teaching method. This research uses a yearlong, quasiexperimental study across six sections of a business communication course to track student outcomes and perceptions of student engagement and learning. The results indicate that there were no significant differences between flipped and traditional classes across the learning and engagement variables in how students perceived these different conditions. However, the flipped condition produced better outcomes for oral and written assignments.

This study investigates how students perceive the outlining process. Students in two business communication sections completed a survey regarding outlining perceptions and reasons for outlining or not. Using qualitative content analysis and qualitative coding, the researcher and an independent coder analyzed 34 students’ responses regarding outlining process, use, and reasons for outlining or not. Results indicate that students perceive outlining as more useful if their outlining process includes both organization and content exploration and less useful if it excludes organization or content exploration. Notable reasons for not outlining include concern for outlining time and difficulty generating content for the outline.

This article offers readers 13 teaching innovations debuted at the 2018 Association for Business Communication’s annual conference in Miami, Florida. The ideas include communication analysis, client assessment and reporting, and oral presentations—all designed to enhance students’ communication skill building. Additional assignment support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on the Association for Business Communication and DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership websites: https://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments and https://salesleadershipcenter.com/research/business-professional-communication-quarterly-my-favorite-assignment

Effective undergraduate instruction requires accurate knowledge of professional communication practices and employer expectations, but ongoing contradictions between academic and professional expectations reflect historical, rhetorical, and pedagogical causes for inaccurate presumptions. Taking a customer service perspective, one business faculty revised its undergraduate goals in terms of empirically determined employer expectations. Interviewing professionals familiar with expectations of entry-level business graduates, the authors identified 10 communication activities, each comprising three to nine subtasks that constitute entry-level communication competencies. The results suggest a need to reconsider traditional curricular organization and instructional focus across the business curriculum to develop relevant skills across all business majors.

We argue that language awareness and discourse analytical skills should be part of business communication curricula. To this end, we propose a three-step analytical model drawing on organizational and critical discourse studies, and approaches from systemic-functional linguistics, to explore agency and action in business communication. Focusing on language and discourse helps students to analyze texts more systematically, researchers to gain deeper insights into organizational discourse, and practitioners to reflect on communication processes and produce texts with more impact. We view discourse as central to organizational processes and render a specific approach accessible and easy to integrate into business communication curricula.

This article extends a dialogue regarding how (and what) communication skills are stressed within business schools, which should be regularly examined and updated. Specifically, this article addresses which skills interns and employers perceive as important. Results indicate that interns and their supervisors have similar perceptions of which communication skills are most important. Furthermore, emphasis placed on communication skills in the business curriculum did not necessarily translate to perceived importance by the interns. Skills employers perceived to be important were compared with adequacy of interns’ skills. Writing, proofreading, interpersonal skills with customers, and listening were among the skills interns lacked.

The arts have not received much attention from business and professional communication (BPC) scholars who are interested in workplace communication. This article begins to fill that gap by explaining a course focused on the BPC that artists produce in their careers. Students learned BPC genres by addressing arts situations: They crafted email pitches to promoters, took promotional photography, created crowdfunding proposals, and more. I argue that teaching artist communication can give a new context to existing BPC assignments, encourage interdisciplinary initiatives, and allow for the incorporation of natively digital communication genres into existing courses.

Although most students have learned to succeed academically, by the time they enter our business communication courses, their time as students is almost over. This article describes the challenges facing “students who will soon stop being students” and introduces the professional online portfolio as a project which enables them to develop the confidence, the capacity, and a concrete platform with which to communicate with the world outside the black box of school.

Business communication programs and business school competitions are a prevalent component of graduate-level business education. Both activities help students develop problem-solving skills, critical thinking, high-level communication, and applied experiential learning. While business competitions may aid in the development of advanced communication skills, to date there has been no comparison of the effectiveness of coursework, competitions, or both. Using U.S. News & World Report rankings of the top 100 U.S. MBA programs as a proxy for program quality, we find that business communication coursework provides greater benefits when compared with internal case competitions. Specifically, findings indicate a higher ratio of graduate business communication classes to internal competitions correlated to higher rank. Furthermore, reputational advantage was also associated with required communication coursework and a higher number of internal competitions offered for graduate business student participation.

This study examines the effectiveness of images on warning signs that communicate risk and risk avoidance in public spaces. Specifically, I compared data from 749 survey responses to determine whether the use of images can increase the effectiveness of a warning sign in a public space. Although the findings indicate that image-based warning signs are better at communicating risk and deterring dangerous activity, longer expository text-only warning signs may be more effective at helping people identify and participate in safe activities. Implications and future studies are offered in the conclusion.

The ability to copy in relevant stakeholders has rendered the business email a useful tool for managing interpersonal relations and operational matters. However, CCing in business email has remained vastly underresearched in workplace discourse literature, a gap this article seeks to address. We explore the functions of CCing in workplace emails and the way formality is negotiated by writers in one organization. We draw on the analysis of email chains and discourse-based interviews and show that employees strategically project professional achievements and assume and deny responsibility for company decisions as they shift between the sender/receiver positions in the chain.

While research has started to debunk some millennial stereotypes, a gap between this cohort and their predecessors persists. In response, two studies were conducted with matriculating millennials to reveal the expectations they hold regarding typical leader behavior and leader-member relationships. The studies establish millennials’ views and communicative and relational expectations of leaders and also help to answer which leader communication behaviors are likely to be valued and potentially most effective with this cohort. This research puts millennial self-report data in conversation with extant research to offer new insight. Suggestions for instructors and managers are included.

This article examines a manageable approach that provides students with significant opportunities to write and improve their writing over time in an introductory quantitative business course. The study examines six elements of written communication skills, as evidenced by assessment data from memorandum assignments administered following pedagogical interventions throughout the semester in an operations management course. Results demonstrate that student performance of audience identification, action-oriented request, and punctuation improved. Interestingly, student performance of grammar slightly decreased. A follow-up analysis indicates that some writing mistakes were related to a lack of proofreading. This article also presents original memorandum assignments and suggestions for improvement.

We investigated the perception and recognition of errors in a population of practitioners and academics in professional and technical communication. Specifically, we measured 303 participants’ botheration levels of 24 usage errors and then correlated those results against their ability to recognize the errors. Results indicated that practitioners were often more bothered by errors than academics and that participants’ overall botheration level might have fluctuated over the past 40 years. Participants’ botheration level also appeared to associate with their ability to identify error. Finally, we found that participants’ gender, job type, and years working in the field influence their error perception.

This article argues that business and professional communication practitioners, instructors, and students, besides becoming better informed about the legal context of website accessibility, should also become more aware of the ethical considerations of creating digital communication products that are inherently accessible for people with disabilities. Through a detailed review of the most important legal cases in the United States and discussion of ethical considerations concerning website accessibility for the disabled, we provide possible entrance points that will help instructors bring ethical considerations into the discussion of website accessibility. We urge instructors to regularly include disability in discussions of accessibility cases.

Using interactive digital maps is now common practice for most universities. Increasingly, more users are introduced to their academic workplaces through online content such as Google Street View and virtual tours. Students with disabilities depend on environmental information to navigate the barriers they face on campus. While most webmasters for postsecondary institutions in the United States know their legal obligations for accommodation in the delivery of web content, legal conformance does not necessarily reflect awareness for social or spatial considerations in the design of campus digital maps. This study discusses an accessibility audit and content analysis of these interactive maps.

This article lays out an approach for introducing students to the writing demands of crowdfunding platforms using a genre-driven research report. Using genre theory and genre ecologies, students leverage primary research to map the genre norms and writing demands within a specific area of a crowdfunding platform, generating a data set to help them either formulate their own campaign or critically engage with the crowdfunding genre.

The Internet is a critical eHealth/eGovernment information source, and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs operates the United States’ largest integrated health care system. This case study used machine-based accessibility testing to assess accessibility for 116 VA Medical Center websites, based on U.S. Section 508 standards and international WCAG 2.0 guidelines. While we found accessibility issues on each website analyzed, problems were generally limited. Notable exceptions included PDF accessibility and fixed-text sizes. The study’s results offer implications for practitioners (accessibility problems likely overlooked and ways to check accessibility) and educators, particularly the need to better integrate accessibility into the curriculum.

Recent research demonstrates that operating effectively across boundaries is more complex than traditional essentialist models in cross-cultural studies suggest. The authors present a teaching model that leverages this research and moves away from static comparative models of intercultural interaction. Using self-reflexive and analytical processes, students learn to apprehend the multiple facets of their own and others’ identities as these become salient in different contexts. The article shows that through the experience of this course, students develop a mind-set which is essential to deal with the complexity facing today’s professionals. Students are quoted verbatim to illustrate the success of this model.