The demands of China's e-commerce education: a study based on SME managers

Wu Mingxuan and Zhang Li
Xi'an Institute of Post and Telecommunications

Xing Qiudan
Shannxi Normal University, China

Philip Tsang
Open University of Hong Kong

Reggie Kwan
Caritas Institute of Higher Education, Hong Kong SAR, China

As China increasingly embraces the world's economy and markets, its higher education institutions are taking steps to keep up with the internationalization of education. These developments include the availability of electronic commerce (e-commerce) programmes, with 42.56% of China's universities running such programmes in 2006. However, research on China's e-commerce education seems very limited, and its programmes appear to be failing to meet the expectations of students and businesses. For example, it has been reported that e-commerce had the lowest employment rate (20%) of all undergraduate majors in 2006 (Zheng 2006), which has raised the question: 'Why do universities still provide e-commerce programmes?' (Cui 2007). Further research on this issue is clearly required.

This paper is based on an email survey of the managers of small and medium-sized Chinese enterprises (SMEs) in the service industry. Six research questions were developed for the survey which related to: (1) the IT/e-commerce/e-commerce marketing knowledge of the CEOs -- a critical factor for business success in this area -- and of the senior and junior staff; (2) the hiring processes for IS/IT staff and for e-commerce staff; and (3) the regularity of staff training in the relevant IT skills. The initial survey was sent by email on 11 November 2006 to 1,103 SMEs, which were selected randomly from China's Yellowpage online, and the data collection was completed at the end of December 2007. A total of 230 SMEs did not respond and could not be contacted, while 873 businesses could be contacted. The contact response rate for Chinese businesses was 18.79% (164 out of 873), with a useable response rate of 12.83% (112 out of 873).

A one-sample t-test was used for data analysis, and all the null hypotheses for the six research questions were not rejected. These results imply that the employment of e-commerce and IS/IT staff, as well as managers at different levels with appropriate knowledge and skills, is critical for the success of businesses adopting e-commerce. Finally, this research makes several recommendations, namely that: (1) there is an urgent need to re-structure the existing undergraduate e-commerce curriculum; (2) it is necessary to introduce a coursework-based postgraduate programme for business managers, such as an MBA with an emphasis on e-commerce; and (3) businesses need to provide short and sensitive courses for staff training on a regular basis.