Computer End-User Skills Important for Business Professionals Now and toward 2005
This study determined the computer end-user skills important for business professionals now and toward 2005 by surveying the Fortune 500 largest U.S. corporations. Fifty-one HR and IT executives in charge of corporate recruitment, training and development in their corporations completed a questionnaire that identified the important computer end-user skills related to hardware, operating systems, word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, database, desktop publishing, telecommunications and groupware, programming, and discipline-specific information systems. The findings indicate that (a) 12 basic hardware and software skills and 13 Internet/Web-centered communication skills are important for all business professionals now and toward 2005, (b) programming skills are important mainly for IT professionals, and (c) skills of using discipline-specific information systems are important for professionals in the respective disciplines, and these systems are considered as integrated components of Web-enabled enterprise systems such as ERP and SCM.