AMBA & BGA EXCELLENCE AWARD WINNERS
How did it feel to win the Best Business School Partnership Award 2024? “It was a terrific experience. It was already such an honour to be up for the award alongside five other renowned business schools from around the world. Then, to win and see the partnership recognised in this way has been incredibly rewarding. We were on a table together with the Deloitte team and it was great to be able to celebrate what we have built.” Birmingham Business School won this award for the Birmingham MBA Deloitte Consultancy Challenge. Could you provide a brief description of this partnership and its underlying aims? “Many of our MBA students express a desire to move into consultancy, so we wanted to respond to that, not simply by incorporating consultancy skills in the curriculum and enabling them to take on consultancy projects as part of their dissertation – we do that anyway, as do most business schools. We wanted to offer them something unique, such as a fully immersive consultancy training programme. “Our corporate relations manager Andrew Miles turned to Deloitte, as they were already employing
our MBA cohorts and putting their associates through our executive programme. Miles approached them to see if they would agree to design and deliver such a programme with us. This is where the value of having a good advisory board comes in because one of its members was a Deloitte partner willing to champion the idea. With that solidified, Miles was introduced to one of Deloitte’s advisory teams to begin work. A member of our faculty, Paul Lewis, had also worked for Deloitte prior to joining academia, so he helped form the design with Miles and has been integral to the partnership ever since. “Deloitte is the largest financial services company in the world. Students gain access and network with the company’s senior leaders through to partner level, which really meets expectations for those doing an MBA. The programme puts MBA theory into practice, provides unprecedented consultancy skills training and elevates participants’ employability.” The partnership was first launched in 2010. How has it evolved since that time? “The partnership’s consultancy challenge is distinctive due to our combined efforts to refresh it each year, keeping it relevant and taking into account issues arising globally. The success of the partnership, meanwhile, has led us to develop a further challenge in responsible business for our undergraduates, with winning students going on to undertake internships with Deloitte. “Furthermore, the partnership has grown from a teaching collaboration to a research partnership that spans the wider university. The team we work with at Deloitte does a lot of work in the healthcare sphere, for example, so we have been able to expand the partnership beyond the business school and sow the seeds of a research and commercial partnership with the university’s colleges of medical and life sciences.” Could you provide a brief description of how the consultancy challenge’s particulars are updated and refined each year? “Acquiring detailed feedback from every student has been key to the consultancy challenge’s success from the outset and allows us to improve the programme
Ambition | SEPTEMBER 2024 | 31
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