Abstract:

Third year capstone assessments have been a feature of most IT and Marketing courses at South African universities in recent years and are centred on identifying and addressing a real-life problem faced by a company. The broad problem that was the overarching theme for this assessment was ‘joblessness in South Africa’. By harnessing Design Thinking and Lean Start-up methods, embedded in the Agile method, IT and Marketing students were encouraged to develop and promote a start-up idea that can be monetised in future. With the advancement in technologies that offer benefits to both IT and Marketing, an overlap in skills is evident, including website building, development and tracking, understanding the target market, and successfully promoting the product which proves that both fields and cannot thrive in isolation. Thus, a first-of-its-kind, inter-departmental integrated assessment encouraged collaboration between the IT and Marketing students to work synergistically on the start-up idea, which aimed to improve their technical skills and competencies, but also raised the issue of soft skills and team dynamics – critical skills that industry deems exit level students are not well-equipped with. To explore these dynamics a qualitative study comprising firstly a combination of IT and Marketing students, and a second group comprising the industry representatives from both IT and Marketing who marked the assessment, will be invited to participate in group interviews to discuss their learnings during the semester regarding the competencies, soft skills and group dynamics they obtained or observed that influenced perceptions of collaboration whilst participating in the integrated assessment. Findings from this study aims to contribute to both academia and industry by presenting recommendations on benefits and challenges of integrated assessments, improving synergy through collaborative integrated assignments, the power of team-work and its significance in embedding in exit-level curricula, and the soft skills required for industry readiness.

Keywords:

Integrated assessment, soft skills, team dynamics, collaboration, Design Thinking, Lean Start-up.