Financial Times: What MBA students want — and what they need

Source: FINANCIAL TIMES

By Nicolas Glady
Feb. 20, 2018.

Business schools must drop a condescending approach to teaching

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he term “user-centricity” may not sound exciting. But in an increasingly competitive business education market, schools can use the concept to distinguish themselves.

What is user-centricity? Many believe it is about putting users at the centre of a company’s process, but it is actually the opposite. The idea is to consider the user’s needs first, and the process second.

For business schools, this means designing courses that can be adapted to the students’ needs — what to learn, how to learn it.

Schools and professors cannot decide what those needs are: we can no longer have a top-down — and condescending — approach to teaching business.

But we cannot simply rely on the students to identify what they need either. By asking students, we may be surprised by their conservative answers. As Henry Ford is supposed to have said: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

A ‘user-centric’ approach to teaching [soft] skills might involve placing the students in a real-life situation

Students now expect to actively participate in designing their own courses. We need to find a balance between what students want, and what experts think they need.

Many business schools are providing experiential teaching, enabling students to “live” situations that are as close as possible to real-life work experiences. Soft skills, which are often those that students most want to develop, are trickier to teach.

For instance, when dealing with big data, soft skills (or “consulting skills” such as being able to communicate clearly and being convincing) make the difference between a technical report and useful, actionable results.

A “user-centric” approach to teaching those skills might involve placing the students in a real-life situation in which they have to present their results and recommendations to managers or executives.

At Essec for example, business analytics classes, which include consulting skills, integrate projects based on real-life sets of data. Partner companies provide data and business problems to solve: the students are required to analyse the data and come up with a solution.

They deliver a presentation to the top management and are assessed on both the methodological aspects (hard skills) and the presentation structure and quality (soft skills).

The accuracy of technical analyses is the fundamental basis of reliable work. However, if it is not convincing, it will not achieve the real objective: transforming the company. Both hard skills and soft skills are a means to an end, which is to improve the company’s ability to achieve its mission.

Experts — in this case business school professors — must help students understand, and provide them with, all the skills required to act in a real life situation.