The partnership between the academic business discipline and the business industry is one of supply and demand. As a School of Business, we need to ensure that we are supplying graduates who are prepared for their fields and can meet demands of today’s employers. During Academic Year 2016-17, three School of Business faculty from West Virginia Wesleyan College partnered with the West Virginia Chamber of Commerce to identify current and future employment needs across the state.  Specifically, our study was designed to identify the knowledge, skills, and attitudes that West Virginia businesses need from employees. One of our primary goals of the research was to ensure that our College’s business and economics students are developing the right knowledge, skills, and dispositions to find employment in West Virginia after graduation, and be ready to contribute to improving the state’s economy. While the results of our research are applicable to institutions in our region, the process is replicable and potentially significant for any academic institution.  In our presentation we will provide information on the development of our survey instrument, access to the instrument, description of the process we used to partner with various professional associations to gather data, multiple uses of the results, and lessons learned throughout the study.