Both industry and education struggle to foster the development of human resources who can manage and design information systems at an advanced level. Human resources, particularly within the field of business modeling, must develop the competency to conduct business in the real world. Determining how to foster competent human resources is an urgent and important issue for all educational programs but especially for professional graduate school programs in information systems. This paper presents the results of our analysis of a seminar aimed at teaching the conceptual data modeling needed for developing a business structure in the real world. The authors discuss the effectiveness and implications of applying this method to gain comprehension ofthe objective business domain and acquire skills derived though the learning process.