Scoping the Path Ahead for Executive Education
After a turbulent year, new best practices for executive learning in the new normal are emerging for university-based business schools and their corporate clients.
For over a decade university-based business schools have been striving to build competence in their clients around managing the VUCA environment. The last twelve months has seen as live a road-test of that theory as anyone could have wanted or predicted—of how organizations cope with all four of the VUCA elements: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.
“We are living the same disruption and challenges as our clients”
Bruce Wiesner, Associate Dean for Executive Education at UBC Sauder School of Business
While businesses are reimagining the workplace of the future, and rethinking what they need from executive learning, business schools are having to respond—to evolve their understanding of what executive education delivery will look like in the coming years.
Business school responded to the global pandemic have progressed since the initial shock announcements and ‘stay at home’ directives which echoed around the globe in the second half of March 2020—and focused on the new practices in executive learning, that are beginning to emerge from both the client and provider sides of the sector.
How much will this pandemic-led disruption differ from previous recessions—where, when growth resumed, the content and delivery in executive education, was not much changed? The accepted view is that we will move to a new paradigm, but how different will it actually be? And how quickly will it take to emerge?