Exploring the mind model of college students toward their pursuing of professional certificates : combining the approaches of CIT and IQA

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More and more enterprises use the possession of professional certificates as criterion for recruiting and promoting their employees. Many domestic universities urge students to acquire certificates indicating mastery of knowledge and skills in subject domains, so that their graduates can show not only diplomas, but also competitiveness and readiness for entering stiff job markets. The governments offer various incentives for schools, which in turn promote and support their students to acquire more certificates. In view of the mainstream towards pursuing certificates, this research tried to investigate the satisfaction and mental model of the key participants in certificate examinations - students. Due to the limitation of quantitative research methods, this research used qualitative approaches to conduct the investigation, in the context of service contact that service providers including examination holding organizations, schools, and instructors deliver services to consumers - students. The research applied critical incident technique (CIT) to understand students'' impression about the most satisfactory and the most dissatisfactory incidents that occurred during the course of registering, preparing, taking, and post-processing certificate examinations. Besides, interactive quantitative analysis (IQA) and focus group method were used to explore the mental model of students who have taken certificate examinations. The research findings could help examination holding organization, schools, and instructors to improve their service quality.