Fontes de referências e expectativas que formam os fatores motivadores da escolha de uma instituição para cursar pós-graduação lato sensu em administração na cidade de São Paulo

Abstract

The idea of this research has emerged from the researcher's interest in knowing the expectations that really lead professionals who are more and more young and inexperienced in the work market to seek specialization through lato sensu post graduation courses, derived from questions posed by students, in her closeness to them as a teacher in such courses. In order to understand the sources and references that most motivate students in the choice of an institution to take a lato sensu post graduation course, and the intensity with which these information correlate according to the evaluation of students themselves, concepts of behaviors of customers of services have been applied, aiming to check their adequacy to such a specific and complex service, not only by the high level of participation demanded from students, but also by course terms, financial investment, and lack of guaranty of obtaining the final result which is the title. The sources and nature of expectations, obtained through bibliographic survey and exploratory approaches, have been evaluated in the classroom, through a quantitative research, with a self assessment questionnaire with 310 students who were taking a lato sensu post graduation course in Business Administration, at a private institution in the city of São Paulo, in March, 2004. The statistical analysis of the results, through multivariated techniques of factorial analysis and discriminant analysis have proved that the main expectations of these students are connected to the acquisition of professional competitiveness and the school choice fundamentally depends on the reliability that it is able to win regarding the possibility to confer such competitiveness, through the combination of several aspects that go from the rules that are established by the school, to tangible service aspects, to explicit communication promises, to the reputation of the school in the specialized media and in the market place, to word-of-mouth information process. Another interesting aspect revealed by the discriminant analysis is that the importance of such expectations and sources of reference are independent from the course, the student's gender, age, or professional experience, but not from the fact that the company is or not paying for the studies.