Towards a Structural Model Connecting Hard Skills, Soft Skills and Job Conditions and the IS Professional: The Student Perspective

The IS professional is a person endowed with certain professional skills and attributes usually formally obtained through an education process. The IS professional may also have formal skills in peripheral, non technical areas that may too be obtained through a formal education process. This is typical now in the education of IS students who are aspiring IS professional. In addition they come with a range of soft skills that may be attitudinal and influenced by life and work experiences. This paper suggests that these skills, attributes and work environment do not sit in isolation from each other, but interact in an as yet unmeasured way. How this happens with students studying towards an IS qualification is discussed here and a structural model is developed to explain the interactions. The value of this research is that a picture is presented that shows the interactions between these important elements in a quantitative way.