Author Information
Ying Wu, University of Dundee, United KingdomKirsty Beaumont, University of Dundee, United Kingdom
Ruth O'Riordan, University of Dundee, United Kingdom
Abstract
Graduate employability is a strategic priority in business and marketing education, yet a persistent gap remains between conventional curricula and the audience-facing work of contemporary practice, and the field lacks an empirically derived framework specifying how that gap might be addressed through curriculum design rather than extra-curricular provision. This study examines how industry-integrated curriculum design creates structured opportunities for students to enact and evidence employability competencies. It adopts a longitudinal, embedded, qualitatively driven mixed-method case study of one undergraduate and one postgraduate marketing module in a UK business school across four cohort iterations. The corpus comprises student evaluation comments, in-lecture feedback and co-design responses, curriculum documents, reflective teaching records and institutional assessment records, analysed through abductive thematic analysis, cross-case comparison, temporal sequence analysis and a descriptive quantitative strand integrated by joint display. The postgraduate module affords a natural contrast between cohorts taught with and without a live client, holding assessment format constant. Industry integration was associated with higher reported relevance and created opportunities to enact digital marketing strategy, analytical reasoning, collaborative problem solving and professional communication, conditional on client-task fit, workload calibration and scaffolding. Postgraduate marks were descriptively higher under the live-client condition, though intact-cohort confounds preclude causal inference, while documented undergraduate curriculum improvements were not accompanied by higher marks. The study develops the BRIDGE framework as a process model of inputs, learning mechanisms, a proximal outcome and an adaptive mechanism, specified through three propositions and four boundary conditions, and advances curriculum evaluation as a dual-tempo adaptive mechanism.
Paper Information
Conference: ECE2026Stream: Interdisciplinary
Published: Wednesday, September 23, 2026
This paper is part of the ECE2026 Conference Proceedings (View)
Full Paper
View / Download the full paper in a new tab/window
To cite this article:
Wu Y., Beaumont K., & O'Riordan R. (2026) Industry-Integrated Curriculum Design for Employability in Marketing Education: The BRIDGE Process Framework ISSN: 2188-1162 The European Conference on Education 2026: Official Conference Proceedings (pp. 613-636) https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1162.2026.48
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.22492/issn.2188-1162.2026.48
Comments
Powered by WP LinkPress