INTERVIEW
Thank you for speaking to Ambition and sharing your views with us. You became Dean of IE Business School in 2021. Could you tell us about your role, and what it involves? When you spend time with peers, you realise there are different definitions of what it means to be a dean. My role centres on educational entrepreneurship and innovation. I believe business education (and higher education, more generally) is at an inflection point. The psychographics of learners is changing, and exciting new ed-tech is emerging, along with new entrants into the education sector, and the new world of work is creating new and multidisciplinary career pathways. Taken together, these forces portend disruption – and my role is enable us to disrupt ourselves at IE Business School, so that we are a leader in redefining business education and what it means to be a business professional in today’s world. I am spending a lot of time with companies and potential students to understand their needs and to predict how these might evolve in the coming years. I am also working with our
Congratulations on winning an AMBA & BGA Excellence Award for Lifelong Learning. Can you share some insight into your winning initiative Turn It Around? In response to the abrupt lockdown across many regions due to the Covid-19 pandemic, IE University designed a virtual ‘Turn It Around’ toolkit, from March to July 2020. This was designed to support students and alumni during a difficult time, extending premium online learning content free of charge, showcasing alumni making a difference in the world, and hosting a comprehensive virtual experience related to professional development, networking, and wellbeing. The response from the community was phenomenal: more than 3,000 alumni and students participated in 56 online events, 906 signed onto our peer-to-peer mentoring platform, and 119 alumni volunteered as speakers or shared their story ‘up close’. MBAs care very much about being responsible leaders. Can you share a little bit more about why the issue of making a difference was core to your alumni strategy, as well as how this was addressed in the programmes? At a time of extreme global uncertainty, we felt it was more important than ever to recognise and showcase our MBA alumni leaders who quickly defined and launched social impact initiatives in the midst of the pandemic. From hotels transforming into Covid-19 hospital
wings to the worldwide production and distribution of protective suits and medical equipment, these alumni leaders truly represented IE´s core values of adopting an entrepreneurial mindset and change-making spirit to impact their worlds positively. They have set a positive example and have served as an inspiration to their peers. Peer-to-peer mentoring is a key facet of the initiative. How did this work in practice? On launching the initiative, we sent out a survey to all Business School alumni to engage with the community, asking whether they needed help, or would be willing and able to provide help to fellow IE members through a variety of engagement opportunities. Those who showed a specific interest in peer mentoring were contacted by our colleagues at talent and careers, and were invited to join our online peer-to- peer mentoring platform ‘Firsthand‘. Firsthand enables users to sign up as mentees or mentors, enabling relationships between IE alumni across sectors. The platform helps people to schedule chats and video calls (without exchanging personal details) to discuss career development needs, critique CVs and share insights on topics of personal interest and/or expertise; for example, startups, product management, assembling founding teams and more. Peer-to-peer mentoring is a powerful mechanism for our IE Community to give back and help make a tangible difference. Both IE mentors and IE
design team to think about innovative new programmes,
innovation in existing programmes, and what a radically new and impactful Business School ‘experience’ of the future might look like.
20 |
Ambition | BE IN BRILLIANT COMPANY
Made with FlippingBook - Share PDF online