Ironically perhaps, this came a few days after my good friend Professor Tom Cannon wrote a powerful piece in the Financial Times on whether business schools had become irrelevant, arguing that industry no longer regarded them as important in solving economic challenges.
As someone who has spent the majority of his professional career within senior academic positions within a range of business schools here and abroad, I don’t wholly agree with the case that Tom makes but I would readily concede that are real challenges ahead to ensure they remain relevant to the needs of the business community.
First of all, it is critical that all business school programmes offer ‘real world’ experiences to its students. In the same way that medical and veterinary schools embed practice into their curriculum, business schools need to do the same to ensure students learn outside of the classroom. This is a major challenge as a recent study showed that whilst 89 per cent of firms agree that embedding work experience within business courses would make students more employable, only 22 per cent actually offer placements or internships.
In addition, 75 per cent of firms agreed that more graduates should seek professional qualifications alongside their academic achievements to give employers evidence of their practical skills. Indeed, employers welcome such professional accreditation as this helps to demonstrate that courses are relevant to the world of work, meet professional standards and include ethical codes.
According to another recent study, businesses are also demanding that in addition to academic knowledge, there is a growing need for courses to develop soft skills in addition to the hard skills needed to perform a specific job function. These include the ability to listen well, communicate effectively, be positive, manage conflict, accept responsibility, show respect, build trust, work well with others, manage time effectively, accept criticism, work under pressure, be likeable, and demonstrate good manners. Indeed, such skills can give businesses a real competitive advantage in the market and add value to the overall economy.
One of the major challenges for all university departments is how to keep up with innovation in learning and how to facilitate emerging models of education such as the flipped classroom, where content is largely delivered online and academics use contact time to discuss and explain rather than to disseminate knowledge. In fact, there is increasing evidence that levels of student satisfaction can be equivalent for online and face-to-face courses if there is a focus on achieving key benefits for students including robust support services, high interaction with instructors and outcomes-based learning.
Another key priority is to ensure that business school programmes at both an undergraduate and postgraduate levels are globally relevant. There are increasingly high expectations from students and employers for business schools to equip students with the skills to succeed in a global community and this can be done through greater numbers of international students as well as an internationalised curriculum.
In terms of research, whilst scholarly work is clearly important, especially attracting high quality students, there is a worry that business schools are becoming too focused on esoteric subjects that are doing little to help the economy. Indeed, businesses increasingly want research that has real impact on industry and students alike. As with the curriculum, business schools will need to work more closely with industry leaders, routinely seek their input and ideas and engaging them directly as thought partners in research projects.
In fact, business schools need to not only broaden their focus of research and teaching towards the bigger public and private sector debates in work, employment and society, but should also engage more with other faculties across the University by becoming a critical part of the knowledge transfer process.
Finally, business schools need to do a much better job of producing graduates with the right combinations of skills for employers. In particular, students need more exposure to real-world situations throughout their education which can range from getting involved in entrepreneurial start-ups or solving a real world consultancy project for an external client.
With a recent study showing that only 33 per cent of business leaders believe that university graduates have the knowledge that firms need, then working with (and alongside) local industry needs to be a major priority not only in increasing the competitiveness of a region but in ensuring that graduates are fully developed and are ready for the world of work.
Therefore, there are major challenges for business schools over the next few years to ensure they make a significant impact on the competitiveness of the business communities in which they are based. However, if they can start to grasp some of the many opportunities that are available to ensure that they can become more relevant to the needs of employers, then perhaps we can be more optimistic than some over their future and the impact they can have on the local economy.