Establishing A Minimum Generic Skill Set For Risk Management Teaching In A Spreadsheet Training Course

TL;DR

This paper proposes a minimum set of risk management skills for spreadsheet training courses, emphasizing generic issues crucial for industry best practices, based on survey feedback from academics and practitioners.

Contribution

It introduces a foundational risk management skill set for spreadsheet training, derived from initial survey feedback, to improve industry-relevant education.

Findings

Initial questionnaire developed and tested with feedback from experts.

Refinement of risk management issues for training curriculum.

Basis for trialling improved risk management teaching approaches.

Abstract

Past research shows that spreadsheet models are prone to such a high frequency of errors and data security implications that the risk management of spreadsheet development and spreadsheet use is of great importance to both industry and academia. The underlying rationale for this paper is that spreadsheet training courses should specifically address risk management in the development process both from a generic and a domain-specific viewpoint. This research specifically focuses on one of these namely those generic issues of risk management that should be present in a training course that attempts to meet good-practice within industry. A pilot questionnaire was constructed showing a possible minimum set of risk management issues and sent to academics and industry practitioners for feedback. The findings from this pilot survey will be used to refine the questionnaire for sending to a larger body of possible respondents. It is expected these findings will form the basis of a risk management teaching approach to be trialled in a number of selected ongoing spreadsheet training courses.