hierarchy but also influence across settings where authority is temporary, partial or shared. Just as importantly, this emerging landscape requires people who can help organisations adapt by rethinking their structures, policies and leadership models. While many schools are actively updating their curricula to remain relevant, I see very few that are seriously rethinking their core functions or proposing new educational models that recognise, support and create value for the new types of career realities taking shape around them. An overlooked opportunity Corporate relations and career services teams are often among the hardest-working professionals at any business school. They play a critical role in building bridges between institutions, learners and employers. Yet beneath this important effort, many schools still operate with a surprisingly traditional career template. Indeed, most degree programmes remain anchored around three expected destinations: graduate employment, upward progression within an organisation, or entrepreneurship. Career services are, therefore, built mainly for entry, placement and movement from one employer to the next, rather than for transitions, repositioning or careers that may span multiple roles or even multiple employers at once. In the best of cases, alumni engagement remains valuable well beyond graduation and many graduates rightly praise their schools for helping them make later-career moves. However, most services are still not designed for the more complex reality of simultaneous, multi-employer careers. Executive education also plays an important role here, yet it is often treated as separate from the school’s core model. This means it doesn’t end up forming part of a broader lifelong learning journey through which participants can make sense of increasingly complex, multi-employer realities. What matters here is not simply that career paths are changing, but whether business schools are set up to support learners through that change. At a time when many schools are seeking differentiation through sector-specific offerings in areas such as sports, healthcare or analytics, they may be overlooking an opportunity in the opposite direction. That is, to serve a cross-sector population of learners with increasingly similar needs around career
complexity, multi-role progression and lifelong reinvention. From an enrolment standpoint, this may be a more expandable opportunity than many schools currently realise. The trend towards lifelong learning Business schools deserve real credit for the stronger emphasis they now place on lifelong learning. Across the sector, this is visible in updated curricula, richer alumni programming and more ambitious executive education portfolios. Moreover, AMBA & BGA explicitly frames lifelong learning as a core commitment of their member schools, while also highlighting changing learner expectations, workforce readiness and alumni engagement as strategic priorities. In addition, many schools have invested meaningfully in infrastructure to support career development and one of my personal favourite practices is welcoming alumni back into the classroom through complimentary elective access. The gap, then, is less one of effort than of fit. As business educators, we remain better equipped to support movement from one role or employer to the next than to help professionals build, co-ordinate and sustain careers across several simultaneous roles or organisations. I was recently reminded of this in conversations with two former students who had both left large
14 Business Impact • ISSUE 3 • 2026
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