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.).