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The process of transition from university undergraduate to business professional is a crucial stage in the development of a business career. This study examines both graduate and employer perspectives on the essential skills and knowledge needed by marketing professionals to successfully perform their roles. From in-depth interviews with 14 graduates and 14 employers, it is apparent that the transition trajectory is both diverse and dynamic. The first main finding is that the transition from marketing graduate to employee is marked by a lack of skills to organically “fit the organization.” Another finding is related to specific competencies such as the ability to have and, most importantly, apply marketing knowledge. These findings have strong implications for the development and redesign of curricula to produce highly skilled, employable graduates and to assist universities in retaining a competitive advantage within the tertiary sector.

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Teamwork skills are important contributors to classroom learning outcomes and graduate employability. Although much has been reported in the literature about the components and characteristics of effective marketing student teams, less is known about how such knowledge is conceptualized and cultivated by frontline marketing instructors. This study applies a perspective of tacit theory to in-depth interviews with frontline instructors in undergraduate marketing courses. Our findings, summarized in a framework of adaptive cultivation of effective teams (ACET), highlight how instructors perceive effective teamwork as a dynamic interaction between three interwoven components of team effectiveness (team composition, team member behavior, and team culture) and adjust their interventions across these components. Overall, this study uncovers instructors’ tacit theories of cultivating effective marketing student teams, and how these tacit theories impact in-class practices.