Impact of Course Learning Factors on Student Interest in Business Analytics Careers

Advancements in internet technology have fundamentally changed how companies conduct their business activities, leading us into a business analytics (BA) era. In this article, the authors aim to investigate factors that could shape students’ career choice considerations toward BA jobs after they have been exposed to BA course content in an undergraduate BA course. They investigated various theoretical perspectives, including experiential and active learning theories and social cognitive career theory, and developed a research model. The model testing results show that the organization and logical flow in how the course was designed and delivered, the help offered to manage difficulty of content, and students’ individual learning effort could influence perceived learning outcomes, which in turn, had a significant influence on their learning interest. In addition, increases in both learning interest and subjective norm had positive impacts on career choice considerations, with learning interest having a much stronger influence over subjective norm.