Students’ Perceptions on the Needs of Ethics Education for Career Development

Ethics education has been capturing attention from both educators and business sectors.  Several studies have suggested the importance of ethics education for preparing students to enter workplace setting.  Wong (2018) has proposed an ethics training framework that covers four main ethical areas, including (i) personal attitudes, (ii) interpersonal relationship, (iii) responsibilities to stakeholders; and (iv) code of ethics in the relevant professionals.  This current research extends the prior study with the aim to further understand students’ perception on the needs of the ethics education for career development, and students’ preference on different forms of pedagogy for learning ethics.  A questionnaire survey was adopted in this study, and 56 responses were collected from tertiary students in Hong Kong.  Preliminary results showed that students indicated high needs on all the four ethical areas in the proposed ethics training framework.  Besides, respondents indicated higher preference on cases discussion and ethics learning activity (e.g. role play, anonymous response to scenario settings) for learning ethics.  To provide more understanding on these areas, further research can be conducted to provide more evidences from the perspectives of students and other stakeholders.