Developing students’ soft skills For Davies, the boost in employability provided by the simulation is the outcome of its primary learning objectives, namely “developing accounting and finance competencies in a way that replicates the real world.” The set-up ensures that students acquire hard skills in finance, while also getting a chance to hone those all-important soft skills, as Sparkes described: “They have to work in a team, understanding the way others function and learning how individuals that have commonly never worked together before can integrate. Teams tend to go through [Bruce] Tuckman’s stages of group development, commonly known as forming, storming, norming and performing. Our job is to try to help them through that storming stage as quickly as possible, although sometimes that is when students have the best conversations because of disagreements about which way the organisation should go.” Alliance Manchester Business School senior lecturer and head of employability Jenni Rose has been using Accounting Bissim in her MBA teaching for the past three years. “The simulation has just the right balance of pushing students,” she told workshop attendees. “This company doesn’t turn around very quickly – it takes a few years, or a few weeks in class, for the company to turn around from being a negative, loss-making and difficult company. So you test their resilience because they’re expecting results very quickly and that simply doesn’t happen in the real world.” In Sparkes’ experience, building students’ tenacity is also a key advantage of using this simulation. “We get teams that fail and they need resilience because they’re technically insolvent at that point. However,
Some of these teams are the ones that get the most out of the whole exercise because of what it takes to work their way back.” The process of participating in a simulation such as this also lends itself well to assessments and the ease with which these can be set up and integrated into a course is cited as a further benefit. “You can set the same assessment every year without any worry of plagiarism because the results differ every time – it’s self-fed from the simulation,” enthused Sparkes. Of course, the simulation’s most-cited benefit is raising levels of student engagement and this can be heightened when the technology utilises gamification, as Sparkes pointed out: “If you’ve got a competitive element, students become far more engaged in it.” In this vein, Rose outlined the further pros of setting Alliance Manchester Business School MBAs a video presentation challenge as a follow-up to the simulation itself. “You can see that they’ve got into it, enjoyed working with the team and had some fun,” she said, after showing attendees clips of the resulting videos. “But they’re also learning those hard and technical accounting skills,” she added. The emergence of VR In another keynote session at the BGA event, Strathclyde Business School director of teaching and learning Dominic Finn shared his experience of using VR technology with postgraduate business students. “One of the things I’ve been talking about with my MBA and supply chain students is that if people are using this in industry, then we should understand what it’s about,” he affirmed. Finn described how one popular target for the technology’s use in industry relates to providing people with “access to situations or experiences that are expensive, risky or impossible.” By way of example, he cited how VR can recreate the scene of a capsizing ship to give people the necessary training for such an emergency in a safe environment. At the heart of this concept is the chance to work on crucial soft skills and Finn revealed how VR could
Keynote speakers clockwise from
bottom left: Jenni Rose,
Dominic Finn, Matt Davies & Darren Sparkes
it’s a safe space to fail and we’ve got adjustments to give them a little boost that helps them get themselves out of that situation.
impact the business school learning experience in this area. “On the MBA, we’ve been thinking about [applications around] negotiation or having difficult conversations. We also
thought the development of empathy is something we could explore by putting people into situations, or an avatar, where you can understand somebody else’s perspective.” The idea here, according to Finn, is
34 Business Impact • ISSUE 2 • 2024
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