Abstract
Over the past several decades, the digital transformation of businesses has revolutionized the role of the digital marketing environment within organizations. Consumer behaviour has also fundamentally changed, affecting important requirements for marketing professionals, and therefore, new hard and soft skills are needed to become successful. In digital marketing, basic soft skills are increasingly becoming more valued by employers and are relevant factors affecting employability. Business graduate students need to develop appropriate skills to succeed in their career and to have a right balance of skills. The aim of the study is to explore the gap between the most relevant digital marketing employability skillset and the perceptions of graduate university students based on the analytics of previous managerial quantitative research and the findings of the current research. A quantitative study was conducted to explore the perceived importance of soft skills related to employability and the difference between students work experience. The demand of soft skills courses focusing on Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) demand was examined focusing on the most relevant soft skills in digital marketing. Key findings of the research explored categories of the perceived importance of soft skills and differences between working students and their perceived skills and the usage of MOOCs. Implications of the results for further academic research is to explore gaps between students’ perceptions of soft skills according to employability research on managerial requirements.
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