Discussion and conclusion
Consistent with prior studies, these results indicate that ‘soft’ skills
are more important to MIS professionals’ career success than technical
skills. The below table shows skills with gaps. The results of this
paper will be compared with the results of Wilkerson (2012). The
Interpersonal category has skill gap in 5 skills out of 9. ‘Teaching/
training others’ has the highest skill gap in the category which is 5.49
and the lowest skill gap was ‘Resolving conflicts’ with a score of 0.25.
Wilkerson measured the same skills but got different skills except for
two which are ‘Persuading others’ and ‘Writing clearly and effectively’.
The Personal category had 9 skills and gaps were found in 8 of them,
meaning, only one skill did not have a gap. This shows that participants
think that all these soft skills are important but don’t have the
required competency in them. Wilkerson evaluated 15 skills and found
skill gaps in the same skills except for one skill ‘Working
independently to accomplish a goal/objective’. The study found skill
gaps in the organizational category. It has 5 skill gaps with the
highest score of 5 in ‘Knowledge of a specific business industry’ and
the lowest score of 1 in ‘Finance’. Wilkerson did not get any skill gaps
in the organizational category.
The Technical Competency category bares 20 skills; 13 of which have
skill gaps. The item with the highest skill gap is ‘Creating Flow
Charts ’ with a score of 5.25. Whereas, the minimum skill gap was
‘Using Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) tools (SAP, etc.) ’
with a score of 0.5. The last category, Core Technical IS Knowledge had
11 items with skill gaps. More than one item is regarding databases;
‘Performance tuning of databases’ and ‘Using a specific database
management system (Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, MySQL, etc.). ’