INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT
Act on a handful of priorities: While learners must leave business school with the knowledge and technical abilities needed to secure a suitable role, they should also understand how they can design a professional life. This entails expanding leadership education beyond the traditional one-employer model, so that students learn how to lead across boundaries and create value across temporary mandates, multiple accountabilities and environments where trust must be built quickly without relying on formal authority. Build more iterative learning into the educational model: As careers become less linear, education cannot remain concentrated around a single degree moment. Learners need shorter, sharper, better-timed interventions across their working lives, whether through modular learning, transition- focused programmes, alumni refreshers or executive education tied to specific turning points. The real opportunity is to become an institution that stays relevant at both entry and re-entry. Address wellbeing: Business schools often celebrate adaptability, reinvention and ambition. While this is fine, non‑linear careers can also create ambiguity, overload and identity strain. To prepare learners adequately, schools need to address boundaries, sustainability and the emotional realities of professional reinvention, as well as opportunity and agility. In that sense, this is an issue relating to careers, leadership development and, increasingly, wellbeing.
HOW TO PREPARE STUDENTS FOR MORE PLURAL, ITERATIVE & COMPLEX CAREERS
Organisations face their own version of this same problem, with many poorly equipped to engage and support multi- role talent effectively because their systems remain built for full-time, single-employer careers. In this sense, business schools can not only better support individuals but also help organisations think more clearly about what these new career realities require. Develop a more integrated value proposition: Rather than simply adding a workshop on portfolio careers or fractional leadership to an already busy calendar of events, schools should consider offering a more coherent model of support. That model should not just focus on helping students and alumni prepare for entry into the workforce, but also for re‑entry, repositioning and reinvention throughout a longer professional life. This means treating degree education, alumni engagement, career services and executive education not as separate silos but as connected parts of one evolving relationship.
Get institutional & programme-level clarity: Before redesigning services or adding offerings, schools may need a more explicit view of the career realities they are preparing learners for. For many institutions, that means looking beyond graduate employment, structured progression and entrepreneurship to ask whether their model is specific yet broad enough for futures shaped by multiple roles, repeated transitions and ongoing reinvention. In a tougher market where every student counts, schools may also need to ask whose needs they are not currently set up to serve well enough. Redefine the problem: An increasing number of today’s learners do not simply need help securing a first role; they need support in making sense of more complex professional lives. As well as employability, therefore, schools must focus on career architecture. That is, students’ ability to combine roles, sequence moves, build credibility, manage risk, navigate identity and make sound decisions across transitions.
Business Impact • ISSUE 3 • 2026
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