Abstract
An important measure of success of sport management programs in higher education is how prepared students are for their professional careers. Programs often include various experiential learning opportunities such as internships in their curriculum to improve student employability. However, there is still concern that students may not be prepared for success in their internships and in the field. The purpose of this study was to identify which skills sport management student interns needed the most improvement, according to their intern supervisor. Using a single institution, this study analyzed intern supervisor’s questionnaire responses from 2017-2022 at a small, private college in the southern United States. The questionnaire consisted of open-ended questions aimed to determine what areas that the sport management intern could improve professionally. The findings show that students needed the most improvement in areas related to soft skills, rather than hard skills. When asked what areas the intern could improve professionally, 8.3% of internship supervisors listed a hard skill, while soft skills were emphasized 91.7% of the time. The results of this study provide information that sport management programs can utilize to better prepare students for internships and the industry.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Ryder, A., McNiff Villemaire, J., & Behl, T. (2024). Hard or Soft: An Exploration of What Skills a Sport Management Student is Lacking. The COSMA Journal. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.25035/cosma.01.01.02Included in
Curriculum and Instruction Commons, Educational Assessment, Evaluation, and Research Commons, Sports Management Commons, Sports Studies Commons