Students' desire and intention to pursue a career in sales continue to lag behind industry demand for sales professionals. This article develops and validates a reliable and parsimonious scale for measuring and predicting student intention to pursue a selling career. The instrument advances previous scales in three ways. The instrument is generalizable across academic settings and is shown to be sensitive to differences across varied course coverage and learning activities. The instrument is parsimonious and offers a high reliability coefficient. Finally, the instrument is validated both before and after exposure to a sales module, thus capturing perceptual and attitudinal changes as students become more familiar with this career option.

There is clear and pervasive evidence of a global shortage of professionally trained salespeople. This shortage is expected to grow dramatically through 2020 across a wide swath of business sectors (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2014). In response, universities have increased their offerings of sales courses and curricular options. As evidence, since 2003, the number of higher education institutions offering at least one sales course grew from 44 to 101, with 32 having some sort of sales major, minor, or degree concentration (DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership, 2012). Over this same time horizon, the number of member schools in the University Sales Center Alliance increased from 9 to 37 universities (University Sales Center Alliance, 2014). Despite this shortage, sales is still the most common first job for marketing students, employing 32% of new graduates. Additionally, sales is the second or third most common career entry point for graduates majoring in management, economics, general business, international business, finance, operations management, human resources, and management information systems (Carnevale, Strohl, & Melton, 2011). Even with these promising career entry statistics, interest in pursuing a sales career is surprisingly low; especially for those just beginning their business coursework (Bush, Bush, Oakley, & Cicala, 2014; Karakaya, Quigley, & Bingham, 2011). For many students, taking a sales position is more about needing to take a job on graduation rather than wanting to pursue sales as a career (Cummins, Peltier, Erffmeyer, & Whalen, 2013). As such, research is needed to better explain student reticence toward sales and how students can become better informed about whether or not sales is right for them (Bush et al., 2014; Peltier & Dixon, 2014). While sales will not be the chosen or right path for all students, the persistent misconceptions about sales as a career among the student population prematurely removes it from serious consideration. From a broader perspective, students' negative perception of the sales role may hamper their academic investigation and understanding of sales as a part of the promotion mix. The role of different selling processes, sales management structures, and the strategic use of personal selling within the broader promotion mix is critical in a robust and complete marketing plan (Loe & Inks, 2014). If students' negative perceptions of a selling career prevent full exploration of the complimentary role sales can play in the broader marketing 568431J MDXXX10.

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PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate which firm‐level antecedent – resource‐based capability or inter‐organizational coordination – contributes to a firm's supply chain management (SCM) focus.Design/methodology/approachA conceptual framework of antecedents of SCM focus and several research hypotheses posit that for a thorough understanding of the behavior of an organization in the supply chain, it is necessary to consider two sets of antecedents simultaneously. Hypotheses are tested using confirmatory factor analysis and multiple linear regression on a set of survey data collected in the USA, Europe and New Zealand.FindingsThe analysis of survey data validates the major premise that inter‐organizational coordination plays an important role in explaining the SCM focus of a firm. Research results validate the positive relationships between the proposed antecedents and a firm's SCM focus.Research limitations/implicationsAlthough the research design incorporates extensive literature reviews, it does not capture every aspect of complex inter‐organizational coordination. Future efforts should establish a valid, reliable instrument to measure the underlying constructs.Practical implicationsThis study shows that a firm possesses inimitable internal resource‐based capabilities and external coordination mechanisms that are unique to each firm. Each of the resource‐based capabilities helps to integrate the various internal functional areas within an organization to increase efficiency and reduce waste. The external coordination mechanisms help a firm to link its processes seamlessly with upstream and downstream supply chain members. The paper also shows that product innovation is the only resourced‐based capability that predicts SCM focus when inter‐organizational coordination mechanisms are considered.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the extant literature by integrating the traditional resource‐based view of a firm with inter‐organizational coordination to examine crucial factors that precede a firm's SCM focus. Both perspectives have considerable merit, so for a thorough understanding of a firm's SCM focus, it is necessary to consider these factors simultaneously.