ROUNDTABLE REVIEW
Barbara Majoor: “I fully agree that learning never stops and I think it’s important to encourage students to be curious; we need to make them aware that they are not done with learning [simply because] they leave Nyenrode with a degree. Within a couple of years, another skillset [will be required]. “As business schools we must take the lead in this debate and explain that for society and the economy we need to educate our students not only once, but twice, maybe three times. [This is due to how often] they will change careers in the future because of the way the business world is evolving.” Kieran Fernandes: “2025 marks our 60th year as a business school and we were set up with a very simple mission: lifelong learning as public good. This is still very much at the core of what we do. “We are seen as an anchor institution in the region; we work with local and regional government and have a number of grants with them, which effectively help with lifelong learning. “Many of these programmes, therefore, are funded entirely through a different model, ie the lifelong learners do not have to pay tuition fees to come and study at Durham. This is not the case for all programmes, but it is for several of them and we genuinely see this as something we are passionate about – we actively engage with local partners in making this happen. As we’ve said today during this discussion, we are all learning new things all the time and that is very much at [the heart of] our DNA at Durham.”
Delphine Manceau: “I’d like to pick up on what José was saying earlier about how we need to teach our graduates to ‘learn how to learn’. This is really important given that we don’t know what the key skills will be in the future, although we know there will be both AI and human skills. “There’s a phrase we use at NEOMA that I like: ‘In an era of artificial intelligence, our role is to foster human intelligence’. I believe in that; human intelligence is only going to evolve in the future, so I think lifelong learning is going to become even more important. “It’s essential that we tell our students – those on both our bachelor’s and master’s programmes – that they will need to keep learning their whole life and it’s good that we present learning in a positive way. It’s not because [you’re compelled to], or your circumstances become difficult, but because you know it will help you develop critical thinking – and that is something you need to [nurture] your whole life.” Ajit Parulekar: “You talk about ‘learning to learn’, we call it autonomous learning. At our school, every student is on a personal development plan on the two-year MBA programme [in addition to their academic studies]. We offer paid subscriptions to a variety of things such as LinkedIn Learning and Coursera, which we then expect the students to align to their personal plan. “We tell students that we cannot teach them everything; they have to be able to learn [by themselves]. We help them in the development of their plan and they have faculty available as coaches, but they must chart their own learning journeys. “The other thing is to make sure that [the students are exposed to] a lot of autonomous learning opportunities. For instance, there’s a rural immersion programme where students spend three weeks in a village in India, five students to a group working on a project. It puts them in a completely unfamiliar, unknown place where they don’t have a learning plan and this [ethos] fits in well with the tagline of our school, which is ‘Learning never stops’.”
Editor’s note: In the interest of brevity and clarity, speaker remarks have been abbreviated and paraphrased. Such statements aim to reflect the original meaning and intent of the participants as accurately as possible
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Ambition • ISSUE 6 • 2025 19
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