What is the Business Information Skills Certificate (BISC): Research Guide?
Welcome to UNB Libraries’ Business Information Skills Certificate (BISC): Research Guide!
This resource is designed to help business students navigate a complex and ever-changing business information landscape.
Improving Your Business Information Skills
The Business Information Skills Certificate, or BISC for short, is a collaboration between the Faculty of Management and UNB Libraries.
The Faculty of Management understands the importance of business information skills to its students. At UNB Libraries, our goal is to empower all students to become knowledgeable, skilled, life-long information navigators. Together we share the common goal of helping business students to improve and strengthen their Information Literacy (IL) skills.
Improving your IL skills will empower you to be more aware of how information is produced, and to make informed and ethical choices when you find, select, evaluate and translate information into new knowledge.
Keep in mind that it’s a competitive world out there! Knowing how to locate, analyze, evaluate and ethically use information from quality business sources will assist you not only in your university course work but also in your workplace.
Employers like to hire savvy researchers (graduates from UNB business programs) who understand the unique nature of business information, and have the ability to craft research strategies that successfully translate data, information and knowledge into actionable wisdom for competitive advantage.
It’s important for university graduates to demonstrate to potential employers that they have achieved these workplace readiness skills.
Whether you plan to start your own business, or join the ranks of a large corporation, it’s never too early to improve your information literacy and critical thinking skill sets.
The Modules
Each module is designed to build and to sharpen your research skills in order to complete your class assignments and become more familiar with the specialized business information resources and databases available from UNB Libraries.
Additionally students have the opportunity to become familiar with the quality content available using several of UNB Libraries’ subscribed business databases:
- Business Source Ultimate
- ABI Inform Complete
- Canadian Business & Current Affairs
- D&B Hoovers
- FP Advisor
- Mergent Online
- IBISWorld
- Statista
- Passport GMID
And Here’s How It Works!
Complete the required activities and the quiz at the end of each module (located in D2L) with a score of 80% or above in each module and you will be awarded a digital badge proving that you are on your way to savvy researcher status! Each badge you earn signifies your successful completion of the learning objectives for each certificate module.
Upon successful completion of all five modules and quizzes prior to graduation, BBA students will be deemed to have completed this compulsory component of the Professional Skills section of your BBA program.
In order to be eligible to receive a Business Information Skills Certificate, students will be required to complete all five modules and collect all five module badges. The certificate can be downloaded and added to your résumé when applying for jobs.
Learning Objectives
The five modules aim for you to:
- Develop a deeper understanding of the unique nature of business information;
- Improve your knowledge and use of UNB Libraries’ subscribed business databases;
- Discover more effective ways to locate company and industry information using library databases;
- Increase your understanding of thinking critically about business information and its sources;
- Access and use business information effectively and ethically;
- Save time in locating quality business information.
Quick Tip:
To move around the book, use the arrows at the bottom left and right of each page to move forward and backward through the modules. Or, use the Contents menu in the top left-hand corner to go to a particular section.
