A fit-gap analysis of e-business curricula and job demand in Taiwan and the US

During the past decade, many enterprises have been re-directing their resources into critical business areas to keep up with economic and market changes. They have adopted electronic business (EB) systems, such as supply chain management, enterprise resource planning (ERP), and enterprise application integration (EAI), to ensure seamless integration with internal processes as well as suppliers and customers. This phenomenon indicates that EB systems are playing an important role in attaining the effectiveness of enterprise operations. However, there is a constant complaint from recruiters that EB professionals with the right skills are hard to come by. To gauge the rapid changes in EB education and industry demand, EB curricula from top universities and job announcements from popular career Web sites in both the US and Taiwan are collected. We analyze the data and compare the results between the two countries to recommend remedial actions for narrowing the gap between industry and academia. 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.