How is your business school working to anticipate the skills that graduates will need in five years’ time? Julie Rosborough “A lot of tasks will be taken over by AI, but softer skills and that human element will become more important. That’s where a personalised approach focused on leadership will be more e ective. I see it all the time with my MBA students; they come on the course thinking they need to know about finance or marketing, but they leave realising that the behavioural elements are what makes the di erence in leadership. “We’ve also learned a great deal from the UK’s senior leader apprenticeship approach and its framework of knowledge, skills and behaviours. We ask our students to score themselves against this framework and then do induction leadership diagnostics with them. We find this to be an e ective way of personalisation.” Tom Vinaimont “As the director of a finance programme, we are very much aware that the financial industry is changing rapidly. For example, we are cooperating with Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business to give our students a course on fintech and decentralised finance (DeFi). These financial developments could, in essence, wipe out the entire industry as we know it and replace it with a di erent one. “There are some skills [from our old methods of teaching finance] that are transferable to this new reality – and even within DeFi there are concepts that will still hold – but the application of these skills will need to be transferred from one model to another.” Deneise Dadd “One thing Coventry has done, not only for its MBA cohort, but also for the entire university, is to introduce graduate attributes. We’re trying to help ensure that our graduates leave with certain key attributes, such as critical thinking and adaptability, so that when they leave they can cope in the changing world. “These attributes also promote lifelong learning because by seeing challenges as they evolve, preparing for them ourselves and preparing our students for them, we also encourage students to come back when they need to upskill. It’s a process of constant transformation and we have to keep on our toes.” Rodrigo Cintra “We’ve been thinking about soft skills and how we can prepare our students when they are all unique, come from di erent backgrounds and are experiencing di erent challenges. “What we came up with was a programme with no course at all. The idea is that students come to us with a real project in a company and we help identify the courses we think they’re going to need and, through mentorship, help them get the level of skills required. Everything depends on the project’s goals – we are no longer deciding what you’re going to study or the skills you’re going to have by the end. You are going to decide and we’re going to help you through the process.
Elaine Limond “Our sta are supported to go back into industry for at least a few days a year. Someone in my hospitality tourism department might go and look at AI within the aviation industry and then bring that back to the team, so that we’re really informed by industry.” Julie Rosborough “We’re very fortunate that our part-time MBAs are in industry and the peer-to-peer learning in our classes is critical. It’s not just us dictating to students, it’s also us learning from the people in practice that are in the room with us. We’ve handpicked a few people to become associate lecturers as they exit from their MBA programme and that’s proven to be very useful.” Salah Khalil “The real challenge will be the 2030 skills gap and crisis because most of the current skills used by graduates will be redundant by then and AI plays a critical role in this. A recent study by Harvard University shows that about 85 or 90 per cent of the jobs in the future are unknown. If you were previously focused on education for enlightenment, whereby you’re trying to create a well-rounded student and you are under pressure to shift to education for employment, it’s worth remembering that industry doesn’t know either what’s going to happen in the future. “This is a good segue into a skills-based education that will be transferable across a number of sectors and geographies. If you can build skills that are not going to decay with time because of AI and that will help graduates use the technology, I think it would be a really good investment. “We’ve got seven years and a huge role lies on the shoulders of business schools because in my opinion they are the ones that are closest to business in a university setting.”
22 | Ambition OCTOBER 2023
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