Bright futures start here
To ensure students can overcome impediments and flourish in their future careers, business schools must support and challenge them to build the necessary resilience, says the University of Sussex Business School’s Rashaad Shabab T oday’s business school graduates are entering employment in a global economy that is rapidly being reshaped by climate change, economic inequality and artificial intelligence. These grand challenges provide graduates with significant opportunities for purposeful careers. However, can business schools do more to enable the successful pursuit of purpose? The widespread adoption of the United Nation’s Principles of Responsible Management Education demonstrates recognition of the importance of embedding the relevant sustainability knowledge into business school curricula. However, the role schools must play in fostering critical personal attributes, such as resilience, is much less commonly understood.
Acknowledging lived experiences In the UK, the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service’s 2021 Starting the Conversation report shows that the number of students entering university with a declared mental health condition was rising rapidly even before the Covid-19 pandemic. Many students at that time then had their social, emotional and intellectual development severely impacted by pandemic lockdowns. Labour market data now reveals the stark impact of these forces. A new report from the Resolution Foundation think tank, entitled We’ve only just begun , found that people in their 20s are more likely than those in their early 40s to be out of work due to ill health. This comes as economic inactivity in the UK reached a new high, with the sharpest increase occurring among people under the age of 25, according to 2024 employment figures from the Office for National Statistics. There is also an established literature in labour economics to suggest that this type of inactivity may have a ‘scarring effect’ on long-term career and earnings trajectories (as discussed, for example, in an article from The Economic Journal by the University of Warwick’s Wiji Arulampalam).
26 Business Impact • ISSUE 2 • 2024
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