FROM THE CEO
THE YEAR IN REVIEW AMBA & BGA CEO Andrew Main Wilson reflects on a year of positives, from welcoming new member schools to being able to reconvene face to face at conferences and looks forward to 2024’s Excellence Awards
O ur 2022/23 financial year ended on to say it was yet another record‑breaking year for BGA. We only launched the Business Graduates Association in January 2019, yet our family of member schools has already sky-rocketed to over 250. This is an even more remarkable feat when you consider that for almost half of BGA’s life to date, no-one could travel internationally and meet customers face to face due to Covid restrictions. Our BGA-accredited portfolio has now grown to 40 schools. Some 28 of those schools succeeded in gaining BGA accreditation at the same time as their AMBA accreditation or reaccreditation. 30 September and I am delighted Our offer of being able to apply for joint accreditation in a flexible manner has proved very popular, with existing accredited AMBA schools saving both time and money, compared to applying for each accreditation separately. In fact, more than 100 of our AMBA‑accredited schools have now become BGA members. Our financial reserves are stronger than ever and put us in a healthy
forging professional relationships through face‑to-face networking. We are fortunate to be working in a people‑oriented industry, where international partnerships are crucial in building world-class, international business schools, so global networking in person has become essential. Meanwhile, we have received a record number of entries across all categories for 2024’s Excellence Awards and I am very happy to say that the quality of shortlisted entries this year is higher than ever. We look forward to welcoming many of you to our gala awards dinner, which will be take place in London at the Park Plaza Riverbank hotel on Friday 19 January next year. Finally, I would like to mention price inflation, at a time when the cost of almost everything in life seems to be rising exponentially. We feel extremely sensitive to the cost pressures facing business schools around the world and so we are making every effort to minimise any increases to our fees, whether those are for accreditation, membership or to attend our conferences. These have all risen only slightly over the past 10 years, as we continue to strive to provide value for money to our customers in everything that we deliver.
financial position. This is an important consideration for all organisations at present, particularly given the global geopolitical and economic uncertainty that is currently prevailing. Now that the global business school community has recovered from the effects of the pandemic and schools are able to travel internationally again, we were delighted to note record attendance at our Global Deans & Directors Conference in Seville in May and our Latin America Deans & Directors Conference, held in Mexico City in September. This proves once again that there is no effective substitute for “In a people-oriented industry, international partnerships are crucial and in-person networking has become essential”
42 Business Impact • ISSUE 4 • 2023
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