English professional communication competence is crucial for fresh graduates to succeed in the workplace and has been identified as a national priority in Malaysia to enhance employability. This study explores key attributes of that competence based on interviews with 12 employers and 9 graduates. Using a basic interpretive qualitative approach, 26 attributes were identified across four areas: linguistic, sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competence. The findings highlight the importance of aligning educational outcomes with workplace demands and offer insights that support curriculum development, targeted instruction, and assessment—informing policy and future research to enhance graduate readiness.

This article discusses the limitations of language proficiency tests in predicting academic performance among business students at the University of Sharjah. It focuses on EFL students who had been instructed in Arabic before joining the university. Using a regression analysis model, the article demonstrates that students’ weakness in writing proficiency cannot be predicted by standardized tests such as the TOEFL and the IELTS. The proposed method uses several alternative variables that can more resourcefully investigate such weakness. The study ended with germane recommendations to EFL teachers and syllabus designers for the enhancement of writing proficiency among this category of students.

Institutions rely on career-ready competencies developed by the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) to understand the nationwide job outlook and labor market trends. The purpose of this mixed-methods study is to inform a course redesign process in the business curriculum at a Midwestern university in the United States. Using an adapted NACE survey, we found that while Midwestern employers and alumni valued NACE core competencies and employability attributes similarly, there were certain elements that were overlooked in the previous curriculum. Thus, identification of the locally relevant top competencies and attributes was a leading factor in the course redesign process.

Design thinking, broadly understood as an organizational and entrepreneurial process aimed at innovative problem solving, has been productively incorporated by scholar-teachers in rhetoric, writing studies, and technical communication. Business communication offers similar opportunities. After briefly explaining design thinking and reviewing related scholarship and pedagogy, the article traces the process of creating an innovative course in business communication through each phase or mode of this recursive method: empathizing with users, defining the problem, ideating and prototyping solutions, and testing and evaluating the prototypes. The article positions course design as a project grounded in radical collaboration, with diverse colleagues as well as students.

Understanding the expectations of employers contributes to the relevancy of business and professional communication (BPC) courses. Studies that bridge the gap between course content and workplace expectations support this process. This article presents findings from a scale development procedure to analyze BPC skills using a multimodal perspective. Employers ( N = 260) were asked what skills they perceive to be communication and how proficient they expect a recent college graduate to be to better understand the expectations that graduates face when entering the job market. The findings have implications for course design, curriculum selection, and program organization.

Persistent concerns about college graduates’ foundational skills for workforce preparedness compels educators to continue exploring ways to address them. Although effective communication is widely regarded as essential for entry-level professionals, which skills matter most may vary. Employers’ satisfaction with communication skills also shifts over time. This study compares regional employers’ and undergraduate business majors’ satisfaction with given communication skills and their perceptions about various skills’ importance. Results showed students rank importance and satisfaction similarly, and students’ satisfaction with their skills exceeded employers’. Regressions showed student satisfaction with specific skills predict their perceived importance. Implications for curriculum development are discussed.

This article explicates the operationalization of a theoretically robust framework in the teaching of business communication at an institute of higher learning. This article reimagines the design of a business communication course that focuses on the coalescence of both decoding and encoding processes of messages as a unified pedagogical approach in teaching business communication. This approach is in contrast with more conventional approaches in designing communication courses, which tend to prioritize one process over the other. Participants in the study acknowledged the instrumentality in the course design in promoting communicative values with real-world impact.

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.

Distinctions between traditional service learning and critical service learning with a social justice focus are important when structuring professional writing courses and defining course outcomes. This article presents a hybrid pedagogical approach for designing a critical service-learning course that integrates a social justice curriculum while focusing specifically on reflection, context, and positionality. Detailing the course design and sharing reflections from students and the instructor, the author argues that the modified immersive situated service-learning approach provides professional communication students the opportunity to become agents of change.

The pressing need to bridge the gap between workplace communicative needs and curriculum development of business English courses has been documented in the literature. Through a questionnaire survey of 215 working adults, this study examines (a) the spoken and written needs of professionals in the local Hong Kong workplace, (b) the challenges they meet, (c) what they perceive as the most difficult spoken and written communication means, and (d) professionals’ concerns about the course content to make such courses effective. This article provides insights into what constitutes an effective business English course and facilitates the teaching and learning of business English.

Organizations are increasingly using social media to improve their internal communication. When successfully implemented, such initiatives can have a dramatic impact on internal efficiency, team collaboration, innovation, organizational alignment, and cultural transformation. This article describes a course offered by the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, on the use of social media for internal business communication that can be modified for Bachelor of Business Administration or Master of Business Administration students. The authors describe the pedagogy behind the course design, provide a course description, and discuss social media/communication consulting projects conducted in the class.