What can we learn from marketing skills as a bipartite network from accredited programs?

TL;DR

This study models the relationship between marketing skills and higher education programs as a bipartite network, revealing weak alignment between skills and job demands through statistical analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a bipartite network model linking skills and graduate programs, providing novel insights into their structural relationships and alignment.

Findings

Skills' popularity and homophily are evident in the network.

Weak systematic alignment between skills and job demands.

Descriptive analysis highlights a qualitative mismatch.

Abstract

The relationship between professional skills and higher education programs is modeled as a non-directed bipartite network with binary entries representing the links between 28 skills (as captured by the occupational information network, O*NET) and 258 graduate program summaries (as captured by commercial brochures of graduate programs in marketing with accreditation standards of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business). While descriptive analysis for skills suggests a qualitative lack of alignment between the job demands captured by O*NET, inferential analyses based on exponential random graph model estimates show that skills' popularity and homophily coexist with a systematic yet weak alignment to job demands for marketing managers.