Formally informal: Collegial communication in a professional work environment

Abstract

Employers want to hire new graduates, but they assert that the latest generation of graduates does not have the oral communication skills necessary to be successful. Courses requiring formal presentations are not doing enough to prepare students for the workforce. Oral communication at a workplace entails so much more than presentations. This paper offers an elegant, yet simple, original assessment method that can be combined with almost any collaborative learning activity in the economics classroom. Students’ evaluations of personal and peer oral communication skills were analyzed before and after introducing the new assessment method. The analysis indicates that students believed the assessment rubric statistically significantly improved their colleague-to-colleague oral communication skills and gave them more confidence in their professional conversations.