The future of business education

A blog post written by the University of Wolverhampton Business School's Director, Professor Clare Schofield, about the future of business education and the launch our new portfolio of courses.

For the past decade business educators have been preparing graduates to thrive in the face of a changing future and we often talk about preparing students for jobs that have not yet been invented because of rapid developments in technology and innovation. That is extremely exciting but also a huge responsibility.

The Business School offers a wide range of undergraduate, postgraduate and professional courses. We are proud that our graduates use the knowledge and skills that they develop in our Business School when they enter the world of work to contribute to local, national and international prosperity. We need to ensure that our curriculum equips graduates with the ability to enhance and grow businesses as well as to support organisations to meet current and emerging challenges.

The University of Wolverhampton have just launched an ambitious new institutional strategy providing a vision for the next decade to 2030 and we have been considering what a University of Wolverhampton Business School graduate entering the work of work in 2030 needs to know and be able to do to meet a wide variety of organisational goals and visions.

Before the Covid-19 pandemic the pace of change was already accelerating because of the adoption of new technologies and the need to adapt to the climate emergency as well as demographic, political and socioeconomic shifts. The pandemic has meant we have all had to learn to work in a different way and adapt rapidly in the way we communicate and live.

At the University of Wolverhampton, like many universities, we adapted the way we delivered all of our courses and student support services to be blended on campus and online. However, we have now gone one step further. We have worked closely with industry leaders and professional bodies and analysed the most cutting edge research to create a suite of brand new courses. Our approach ensures our courses have the most contemporary content and that our learners develop the skills, knowledge and competences they will need to succeed in their future.

Curriculum review is a process that all UK universities engage in at regular intervals and it is part of our university regulations. During the curriculum review process outlined by the University of Wolverhampton, we were also able to seek the views of our international partners, the business community and our professional accreditation bodies. We also consulted leaders of businesses in diverse sectors including manufacturing and the third sector, tourism and professional services, as well as with policy makers to analyse data on sectoral and industrial trends in the West Midlands and nationally. We have developed a new Business School strategy that is underpinned by four pillars that we have embedded into our new courses: 

1. Sustainability
2. Responsibility and Professionalism
3. Entrepreneurship and Innovation
4. Digital and Analytical

All of our new courses will launch in September 2021 https://www.wlv.ac.uk/news-and-events/latest-news/2021/june-2021/university-business-degrees-receive-exciting-overhaul.php