Enhancing Retention of FutureInformation Professionals UsingAttitude Inoculation

Abstract

Employment predictions in the field of Information Systems (IS) vary over time, but em-ployers often report a gap between the available IT workforce and their needs for skilled in-formation professionals. The existence of such gaps raises questions about how college stu-dents make decisions about persistence in majors with respect to available informationabout employment prospects. The main objective of this article is to understand whetherand how inoculating messages may help students to maintain pre-existing positive attitudestowards occupational features of the IT profession; to explore why some choose to stay inthe information technology disciplines; and to suggest potential solutions to augment thenumber of those who stay. This research study used Inoculation Theory to hypothesize that students who heard aninoculative message prior to a persuasive message concerning post-graduate employmentwould show a greater resistance to attitude change than students in a control group, andthat there would be a difference in resistance to change based on gender and on programof study. The results of our field experiment showed that significant differences arose among thedifferent groups of students. As hypothesized, the participants in the treatment group hadmore resistance to attitude change; participants in control groups were more affected bythe persuasive message than participants who had received an inoculation treatment. Theanalyses did not detect significant differences in attitudes based on gender and major.These results have implications for effective retention of future information professionals