Abstract:

Transition from the college classroom to the workplace requires certain job knowledge, skills, and attitudes (KSAs). How and where the New Employee acquires these KSAs is mired in the transition between education and the world-of-work. This dissertation informs the college-to-work transition process through the experiences of college graduate liberal arts majors and of those responsible for integrating the new employees into the organization. Three new employees and two managers working on information technology products and services in a major corporation were interviewed. A grounded theory approach was used to discover patterns in the data. This method allowed the researcher to inform the complexity of the college-to-work transition process. The researcher discovered a naturally evolving process dominated by informal learning that new employees used to learn about the culture and the specific job skills need in the corporation. In many ways, the participants had evolved a process similar to the apprenticeship system of the middle ages.