Curriculum Gap Revisited: LLMs, Adaptive Expertise and PBL for IS

Abstract

The Information Systems (IS) field has long faced a misalignment between curriculum guidelines and labour-market expectations. Drawing on prior studies comparing Swedish IS job advertisements with the IS 2010 Curriculum Guidelines and the IS2020 Competency Model (Steen and Pierce, 2020; Steen and Pierce, 2023), this paper argues that the mainstreaming of large language models (LLMs) since 2022 has intensified this gap. IS education remains largely organised around stable, codified competencies; the paper argues that, in the post-2022 context, employers will increasingly value adaptive expertise, critical AI literacy and robust transfer across contexts — a claim the planned empirical phase is designed to test. The Stanford AI Index from 2026 places this concern in wider context, reporting that formal education is lagging behind AI and that employment among software developers aged 22 to 25 fell nearly 20% from 2024, suggesting pressure on the entry-level roles for which IS programmes traditionally prepare graduates (Sajadieh et al, 2026). Against this backdrop, the paper makes a conceptual and programmatic case for problem-based learning (PBL), reconceived through Savin-Baden’s (2014) new constellations framework and Barnett’s (2017) feasible utopias, as a pedagogical architecture for developing adaptive expertise. Rather than proposing another curriculum revision, I argue for rethinking how IS education is designed and delivered, with LLMs functioning not as answer engines but as co-inquirers that stretch students’ reasoning, judgment and metacognitive capacity. The paper engages the debate over minimally guided instruction (Kirschner, Sweller and Clark, 2006; Hmelo-Silver, Duncan and Chinn, 2007) and concludes with a research agenda comprising a regional employer survey and follow-up interviews. Prior content analysis of 12,358 Swedish IS job advertisements showed that interpersonal dispositions appeared in 97.3% of postings and enterprise architecture in 15.1%, areas current IS frameworks under-weight. A planned next phase will survey approximately one hundred employers in the Öresund cross-border region and conduct in-depth interviews with recruiters, IS managers and recent IS graduates, probing the reasoning behind employer expectations that the prior job-advertisement data could not reveal. The paper contributes a structural argument and a planned empirical programme to the IS education community.