A Business School’s challenge: a learner centered
individualized curriculum, developing in community
managerial diversity
Walter Baets, PhD, HDR
Associate Dean for Research
MBA Director
Professor Complexity, Knowledge and Innovation
Euromed Marseille Ecole de Management
Introduction
If one would believe in coincidence, Le “Monde de L’Education” (a French monthly on
educational matters) of July-August 2006 is completely devoted to educational
innovation, the school in crisis, learning “differently”, etc. Bernard Stiegler refers to
Gilbert Simondon, suggesting that the individual needs a life-time to develop from the
isolated individual to the collective individual. The new media invite the individual to
isolate further from its community. Eventually our school system, very often designed
and managed for the intellectual elite, delivers individualized and standardized
managers that according to certain are unadapted to be socially responsible managers.
The Business School of today needs to face that challenge, if indeed they do not want
to vanish. What future do Business Schools have?
Despite the fact that management is to a huge extent based on rigorous scientific
approaches, companies excel since they have managers that can make a difference. The
« art » of management, hence, has a lot to do with the personality and leadership of the
manager. Only if knowledge is enriched with the capacity to think lateral, to motivate
people, but above all to be oneself, a manager will mark the company he or she is
working for. It is this combination of scientific rigor and personal development that
should be the backbone of a good Masters in Management program. In order to make
this contribution very practical, I will refer to our own experience, illustrating some of
the ideas with details of our ESC program (Programme Grande Ecole, Master in
Management).
Management development in general, and management education more specifically, is a
four dimensional time-space event. The future manager has to acquire the necessary
knowledge, which is the theory of management, expressed in management concepts.
Furthermore, s/he should know how concepts are applied in reality, which is often done
via cases and examples. The difference, however, is made in the acquisition of the
necessary management skills that allow the manager not only to understand how the
concepts are applied, but also to feel familiar to apply them him or herself. This set of
management skills can only be mastered via activities and projects. This is where the
PRO-ACT philosophy of Euromed (learning-by-doing projects) comes in. A last, but not
least, dimension in management is personal development. Only if I am able to make the
future manager think or act differently, if I am able to touch the personality of the
manager, it will have an impact on his or her behavior. Personal development is
everywhere or nowhere; one cannot teach it; one has to enact it. In the Bachelors year,
explicit attention is given to personal development tools in order to allow the students
to further develop them in the Masters years.
It is clear that this vision can only materialize if there is a lot of open space for the
students to choose their own learning path. They have to be able to develop into what
they really want to become. As one can observe, therefore there is a lot of possibilities
to individualize the program.
It is this view on management development that we have translated into a specific
pedagogical approach and a program.
The Euromed pedagogical model
Vision of the school
The vision of Euromed is not only a vision of a business school, but it is indeed rather an
understanding and interpretation of an economic reality. Euromed believes that the
challenges that companies will face in the years to come can be described as follows.
Particularly in Europe, but of course all around the world, people, cultures and
managerial practices show a wide range of diversity. Particularly in management
education, we have seen over the last 20 years one prevailing management metaphor
becoming increasingly dominant: what we call the Anglo-Saxon view on management.
Without making any attempt to define what that would mean, a number of key
characteristics are the following. This view presupposes that there is one best way of
solving management problems, and that a number of management tools are available in
order to help the manager. Evaluation of company performance, both efficiency and
effectiveness, is mainly made by use of financial measurement. In order to train future
managers, management education is organised in different disciplines, that all have
their own logic of mechanistic organisation, optimisation and forecasting. The world is
assumed to be linear and static and highly rational. The logic of the (financial) market
has driven the shareholders over the last 10 years to a very short term view on
corporate performance (the shareholder value). In fact, shareholdership and
management became increasingly two different activities. A paradox appears between
the two, but in fact a paradox appears between the short term and the long term,
between financial performance and sustainable development.
Of course it is clear that the Anglo-Saxon model has brought us a lot of insight in the
functioning of markets and companies and therefore it is extremely important to
clearly understand this model. But there is more. While the Anglo-Saxon model
implicitly wants to wash away diversity as a disturbing factor, it becomes clear in the
wave of mergers and acquisitions that currently go around the world, that diversity can
be a creative force. We like to label as one of the constituent factors of the Euromed
vision, the importance we give to the role that diversity can play, and in our opinion
needs to play, in order to tackle the corporate world in the coming years. Openness to
diversity, understanding of different world- and economic views enrich future managers
considerably. We gladly take the metaphor of the mosaic. If the world consists of
different colours we can either melt the colours together in order to make it one
colour, or instead we can create a mosaic, keeping the different colours and have them
networked in such a way that it becomes a nice picture. On top of management as a
science, we also want to understand management as an art. The Euromed vision clearly
aims to enrich the prevailing Anglo-Saxon one.
In some way the Euromed vision on management, hence, is one of diversity, sustainable
development and network structures. Studying the evolution of companies today, we
see that even the larger corporations are in fact a highly dense network of business
units, outside providers, individuals, clients, etc., that in fact form a number of often
flexible, overlapping and dynamic networks that cut across the company, instead of just
a nicely and smoothly organised company. In our programs, we want to train students
to be able to become the future managers of this kind of networks.
Once we accept this vision, we clearly need to extend the basic skills and knowledge of
our students with courses that are exploring the cutting edge of scientific development
in the area of the networked economy, systemic views on management, the role that
innovation plays in corporate renewal and for instance and in particular in
entrepreneurship. Students need to understand what a knowledge based economy is,
and how companies have to deal with knowledge and learning for constant adaptation. In
fact and in summary, students need to learn, on top of the classical model, to
understand and to operate in a non-linear dynamic economic environment. That needs an
extended model with an extended curriculum. But above all, it needs an adapted
pedagogical approach that allows students to digest these new insights and to be able to
live the paradox between the classical model and this dynamic model.
School’s vision
Research agenda
Core courses
Electives
The School’s vision translates into the research interest of the School that in turn
feeds into, mainly, the electives offered to the students, and for the part related to
the Euromed vision, also in some core courses. The translation of the vision into
research programs is not described here. It is clear, however, that the research
undertaken by our own faculty, as well as by the larger research community, should have
an immediate translation into cutting edge electives.
The pedagogical concept: learning instead of teaching; learner centred instead of
teacher centred; individualised approach
As already suggested, in order to be able to allow and use diversity as a constructive
principle, the pedagogical model needs to be highly individualised, and focused on the
personality of the “learner” (the one that wants to learn). Most classical pedagogical
approaches, though, are based on a standardised curriculum, focusing on (standard)
content. These approaches are in fact based on what is known as the transfer
metaphor of education. (For detail on all this, please refer to Baets and Van der Linden,
2000 and 2003).
Classically, business schools consider knowledge in general and, more specifically,
subject matters, as transferable commodities. A student is seen as a vessel positioned
alongside a loading dock. ‘Knowledge’ is poured into the vessel until it is full. Whereas
the student is the empty vessel, the teacher is a crane or a forklift. The teacher
delivers and places knowledge into the empty vessel. Courses applying the transfer
theory would be very much lecture-based, would include talks from leading figures in
the relevant fields (the more the better) and would provide students with duplicated
course notes. Once the vessel is filled, a ‘bill of loading’, which is the diploma, certifies
the content of the vessel. IT improves the speed of the loading (with high tech
cranes). Nobody can guarantee that in the next harbour, the cargo is not taken out of
the ship again. Monitoring a student means monitoring the process of filling the vessel,
signing off the bill of loading, and sometimes sampling the quality of the contents.
Our pedagogical approach, instead, is built on a different concept by which the teacher
initiates and guides the students through an unknown terrain that needs to be explored.
The student is the explorer and the teacher/tutor is the experienced and expert
travelling companion and counsellor. The guide not only points out the way, but also
provides travelling maps and a compass. To a certain extent, the ‘teaching methods’ (if
one can still call them such) which are used in applying this concept are more
experiential methods: simulations, projects, exercises with unpredictable outcomes (as
in some case studies), discussions and independent learning. For this reason, we have
developed the “Pro-Act pedagogy” that is explained further on. Subject matters are a
set of experiences that each student should incorporate into his/her personality. The
aim for the student is to develop his/her personality. In this theory, the monitoring
process consists of monitoring the personal development of the student. It should
not be forgotten that becoming a manager, in many respects, is working on one’s own
personality.
The consequence of the application of this ‘new’ pedagogical metaphor is that
management education should pay more attention to the managerial process than to the
theoretical knowledge supporting it. Management education should be more competency
driven than knowledge driven. It should not be an organised search for the Holy Grail:
the one (always) best solution; for the simple reason that the chance is little that this
solution exists. Even more, management education should not attempt to look only for
solutions, but rather for possible ways of travelling.
The visionary choice that Euromed has made, necessitates a learner centred, personal
development oriented approach. Our approach embraces self-organized learning. As it
is learner-centred, it enables learning at each individual’s pace and style allowing each
individual to explore in the depth and breadth necessary for that particular individual
(of course always within the framework necessary for granting a diploma).
At the same time, our perspective embraces the non-linearity and dynamics of learning
processes. The learner carries an important part of the responsibility for the learning
process as individual mental models only get created through individual learning
experiences.
First, the conceptual level provides a common language, a learning base which reflects
the minimum of what a student should "know". He should at least be able to translate a
managerial phenomenon into a conceptual level, come to an understanding by asking
pertinent questions, and translate that understanding back into a practical level. It is
the start of developing critical distance.
It is important, however, to look further than just the content of knowledge and
treating it as a simple informational commodity, and to focus on the dynamic process as
well. Therefore, "reflection-in-action" is enhanced through a level of actual practice
that steers the development of a notion of "best principles". Learning cannot be
abstracted from actual practice. Concepts detached from actual practice distort or
obscure intricacies of that practice. Without a clear understanding of those intricacies
and the role they play, phenomena as well as concepts cannot be well understood or
enhanced.
Several elements drive this "reflection-in-action" level. The very practical management
component can only be acquired by ‘doing’. Action-learning projects (PRO-ACT) provide
an ideal opportunity to ‘exercise’ management. It is based on the assumption that
students learn more effectively with and from managers and teachers while all are
engaged in the solution of actual, real-time and real-life problems occurring in a worksetting, applying the normal business pressures and constraints of organizational
realities to ensure a high quality outcome. Real life in-company project not only give the
student hands-on integrative experience, but also creates an immediate, visible, and
tangible contribution and return on investment for the firm. Besides, project work
offers a unique opportunity to assess whether the student is able to apply the
knowledge he has acquired within the specific context of a particular company. For the
student, the project offers the opportunity to integrate knowledge, skills and attitudes
within one exercise, while teachers provide enabling constraints and take the role of
experienced and expert guides.
The chosen pedagogical metaphor obviously also steers the teaching philosophy.
Teachers act also as tutors, mentors, facilitators and helpers within a subtle mixture of
coaching, negotiated authority and learned freedom. Part of the responsibility for
learning is shifted to the students, for example by choosing an individualised
curriculum, the choice of their PRO-ACTS, by setting a particular pace or taking a
particular approach according to the individual's learning style.
A last level of learning concerns competency development and the overall educational
competency framework. It puts great emphasis on the capacity of individuals to
continuously learn about their performance, their objectives and capabilities within
ever-changing contexts, and in the light of this learning, to change, and to learn from
the change. Competencies also portray the leap from information to knowledge by
giving meaning to the flow of information and involvement in organizational contexts.
This is what Euromed refers to as their “PRO-ACT Employ”: the capacity of a student
to be able at any moment in his career to have the correct employability. Obviously,
this surpasses largely just finding a job when leaving the school.
In addition, the educational competency approach also focuses on the development of
capabilities. Capabilities describe, for instance, the behavioural skills needed to
communicate, to work as a member of a team, or to understand the dynamics of the
context in which individual managers work. They allow people to develop and sustain
competencies through continuous learning, as a genetic sequence of evolutions. Lastly, a
personal development path completes the educational competency approach.
Applications Sk
Cases Ac ills
t iv
iti
e
s
In order to visualize this concept, we would like to use the following diagram.
Concepts
Theory
The fundamentals of management development
Management development, or management education per se, has at least four
dimensions. The first one, and the most classical one, is the managerial theories that
are often contained in “concepts”. Examples of concepts are “ROI”, “market
segmentation”, etc. This is what is genuinely found in textbooks, can be read over
there, can be found in (virtual) libraries and it is only a basic resource for a process
that should go much further. Unfortunately, that is what is classically still “thought”
principally in most schools, Business Schools included.
A second dimension is the one of application: what can be done with some of these
concepts ? How can a ROI be used ? Applications are often illustrated using cases.
We feel it is fair to say that most Business Schools are mainly involved in teaching
concepts and illustrating them with cases.
However, companies expect different things from their (future) employees. Companies
expect managers particularly not to do what the others (can) do, but rather they should
make “the difference”. An outstanding manager is a manager that makes the difference
in the company, in the market, in the industry. We sometimes label that as a visionary
leader. Companies, hence, are interested in (future) managers that have the necessary
competencies, in order to apply concepts and applications in such a way that it does
make a difference. We are talking here about managerial competencies, as explained in
lots of detail earlier in this chapter. Managerial competencies, as equally explained
earlier, can only be transferred via (learning) experiences. Assignments, real life
projects, cases without a unique outcome, etc. allow the students to experience and
develop via experience the necessary managerial competencies. This of course
perfectly fits the pedagogical model described earlier. It is this dimension that is core
to the PRO-ACTs.
Eventually, and most influential for impacting on the student, is the personal
development dimension. Only if a curriculum is able to “touch” the student, and is able
to create a stronger and more creative personality with a student we can say we have
succeeded. If a program does not succeed to really invite for and support the
development of the student as a personality, from a young high school graduate to a
potential manager, the mere learning of techniques will not be sufficient. On the other
hand, it will be clear by now that personal development cannot be thought. In a further
section we will introduce the Euromed personal development approach since it is the
backbone of the curriculum.
In summary, management education that prepares a student for his role as future
manager that is able to make a difference in a company, that carries diversity as a
creative force and is able to think in terms of sustainable development, will have to be
composed of those four dimensions: concepts, applications, competencies and personal
development. When students, particularly coming from the “classe prepa”, enter
Euromed, they are rather “concepts” and theory oriented. Specifically in the “classe
prepa”, there is an almost exclusive focus on the acquisition of intellectual, analytical
skills. In a broader perspective, this is also the case in the first few years of any
university education. The role that Euromed assumes as his, is to support students to
move gradually away from the more concepts and applications dimensions, into the more
management competencies and personal development dimensions. In doing so, the
Euromed curriculum and approach moves away through the different years, from
teaching students, into support the students in their learning endeavours.
This approach allows to accommodate an individual curriculum; it facilitates learning via
an individual learning path that creates all room for diversity as a constructive principle.
Translation into the programs (with the ESC as an example)
At this stage we attempt to integrate the vision of the school (allow us to recall:
sustainable development, diversity, Euromed regional management practice, innovation,
transversality and systemic management approaches) with the pedagogical model chosen
(concepts, applications, skills, personal development). The vision of the school, as
already mentioned, is partly translated in some core courses, but mainly in the electives.
As a way of example, we use the ESC program in order to illustrate this translation.
PR
O-
AC
T
Sustainability Diversity
ki
HRM
Marketing
Finance
Strategy
Complexity and
the networked
economy
Research themes (applications)
Core disciplines (concepts)
Innovation
Intrapreneurship
lls
)
Sector profiles (Master Specialisé)
(s
Euromed: Intrapreneur- Transversal
regional
ship, Innova- projects
management tion,Knowledge
Professional profiles (Master Specialisé)
The ESC program is a three year program after two preparatory years. The first ESC
year is, hence, the last Bachelors year, while the second and third ESC years are
Masters years. During the bachelor’s year, the students receive almost exclusively core
courses, covering all possible disciplines that are standard in a business school
(marketing, finance, accounting, organisational behaviour, etc.), though with a clear aim,
already, to work with a more transversal focus. The master’s years are in fact
completely individualized: the students chose (other than 6 more core courses) but
electives. On the diagram above, we have combined the Euromed vision with the
pedagogical model developed. In the left hand column, we see the 6 core courses
offered in the masters years: finance, marketing, human resources and strategy
(representing the more classical functional domains in a company) completed with two
core courses, typical for the Euromed vision: Innovation and intrapreneurship, and
Complexity and the networked economy. These core courses (together with the courses
of the first year) form the “concepts” dimension of the pedagogical model. The
applications dimension (see the header of the table) is formed by the electives, mainly
based on research of the school that in turn is a translation of the vision of the school.
As argued earlier, the vision is researched and elaborated via research programs and
afterwards translated into electives. The third dimension of the pedagogical model, the
skills dimension, is acquired mainly through the PRO-ACTs (“Projet–action”).
Furthermore, whatever the student could not learn, either in the core courses, or in the
electives, can be acquired via a number of projects (PRO-ACT), to be defined by the
student. As already mentioned earlier, the fourth dimension (personal development)
receives special attention in the next section.
As can be expected, Euromed also offers a number of electives of a more general
nature, that one could expect in most Business Schools, and that prepare rather for
specific professional profiles (auditor, marketer, etc.) or sectorial specialisations (i.e.
banking expert). The strategy is such that since we want to keep the general masters
program indeed with a generalist focus, in time we would like to split off some of those
professional or sectorial specialising courses into specialised masters programs (as is
already partly the case today).
The grid illustrated above, is content wise a perfect translation of the vision of the
school, indeed made coherent with the pedagogical approach chosen that is necessary
for enabling to deal with problems of diversity and sustainable development. This grid is
applied in principle in the particular course designs, but of course to different degrees.
It is clear that in the ESC program, our flagship program, the application of this grid is
best developed.
The next and last step of the translation of vision, via pedagogical model, into programs,
consists of the coherent integration of the personal development dimension.
Personal development and the PRO-ACT pedagogy
This is not the place to elaborate in any detail on what personal development is, could
and should be (for more detail either see Baets and Van der Linden, 2000, or Baets,
2006). However, in order to understand the choices made, it is necessary to briefly
sketch the underlying conceptual model on personal development, within the Euromed
vision. The Euromed vision attempts on top and beyond the mainstream Anglo-Saxon
management model, to facilitate the student’s competence to deal with a highly dynamic
and networked environment. In other words, Euromed offers their students not only a
functional reductionist approach to management but also and with an equal focus, a more
holistic view on management: one could say a more systemic approach to management.
Using Ken Wilber’s model for holism (Wilber, 2001), I would like to illustrate the
different dimensions of personal development in an integrated (management)
curriculum. Once this conceptual model explained, it will serve as the conceptual
grounding of our approach, but it will also allow easily to illustrate in what the Euromed
approach is unique and different from what the others do.
The Wilber model illustrates the multiple dimensions necessary to create a holistic
management experience. This picture illustrates in what the Euromed pedagogical
approach tries to be unique and how it extents the more classically accepted AngloSaxon model.
Holism, simply said, is the acceptance that what one can observe, is more than the
simple addition of the different composing elements. There is something present in the
observable whole that makes it different from the sum of its composing elements. In
respect to companies some refer to this as the tacit corporate knowledge, the shared
mental models, corporate culture, etc. The idea is not to explain or explore what holism
would really mean, but it is necessary for understanding the materialization of our
vision, to understand what the different dimensions are of a holistic management
approach. Wilber’s diagram explains those dimensions using two axis: the individualcollective dichotomy; and the interior-exterior dichotomy.
The Euro-Mediterranean Management Approach
•Personal development
•Leadership
•Making a difference
•Self motivation
•Emotional development
•Joy
•Involvement
•Responsibility
•Respect
Individual
Personal
Development
(Learner centered)
Anglo-Saxon
Management
Approach
•Quantitative approaches
•Control/performance
•Management by
objectives
•Models
•Financial orientation
•Short-term efficiency
•Production management
Internalized
Externalized
•Historic legitimacy
•Diversity
•Sustainable development
(long-term perspective)
•Social responsibility
•Euro-Mediterranean
sociology
•Humanism
•Relativism
•Dynamic system behavior
•Management in complexity
•Management in diversity
•Knowledge management
•Community of practices
•Ecological management
•Ethics in management
•Social corporate responsibility
•Sustainable development
•The networked economy
•Emergence, innovation …
EuroMediterranean
Values and
Culture
(Identity)
Holistic
Management
Approach
Networked
The scientific approach to (management) sciences, based on a rational view of the
world, deals exclusively with the right upper quadrant: the Individual-Exterior. If we
want to understand how the brain works and what we think, we have to measure the
brain operation. In this quadrant things should be measurable and controllable in order
to be important (or even existent). In respect to management, that is where we find
content oriented courses: management control, market forecasting, optimisation,
logistics, etc. In summary that is where we could position most of the Anglo-Saxon view
on management. In this view, all interesting things for a manager can be taught in
courses. Courses are focused on tools and techniques. Control and optimisation are the
main challenges.
A second step in the creation of a holistic management perspective is positioned right
under, in the collective-external combination. We consider systems as interacting
elements that create a logic of its own, that surpasses the simple addition of the
composing elements. In this quadrant we find the more ecological approaches to
management, network theories and applications, sustainable development models,
complexity theory, concepts around diversity as a constructive force, etc. Still,
however, it is al conceived as external, as rather independent of the emotions of
individuals. This kind of subject matters are already scarce on regular Business School
curricula.
Once we move in the left part of the figure, the internal dimension, we first have the
shared values and cultural dimension. In this left part of the figure, we are much more
concerned with how people (students, future managers, managers, clients) feel culture
and shared values, how they co-create and co-construct them and how they are shared.
In this part we do not talk about diversity anymore, we use in practical cases, diversity
as a creative force. We do not talk anymore about sustainable development, but we
develop projects that contribute to sustainable development and we evaluate in what it
changes our personality and the personality of the people involved. In this left side of
the diagram, we really enter into the personal development aspect of the programs.
The left upper quadrant, finally, is completely oriented on the personal experience and
its impact, of what we call personal development. The point here is certainly not to talk
about personal development, but to really work on one-self in order to craft one-self
into the person that one really is (“become who you are”). This is highly individual and
internal, but can only be successfully reached if the student is correctly supported. In
this left side of the figure, both upper and lower quadrant, we really talk about
personal development, not as a subject matter, but as a living experience.
Only the four quadrants together, allow the student to develop in a future manager that
is able to make the difference. In other words, the student has crafted his own
employability, with the help of the Euromed program (pedagogical model). In contrast,
the Anglo-Saxon model is focused mainly in the right-upper corner. Indeed most
schools have personal development courses, or multicultural management courses, but
these only restrict a very rich experiential environment and activity into a (theoretical)
course. The students consume the concepts and the applications (examples, cases) but
cannot live the real experience. This is one of the main reasons for the creation of
what we call PRO-ACT (Project Actions), on which we elaborate now.
Based on the vision developed by the school and the pedagogical model designed, it is
clear that personal development is not just an essential part of the curriculum, but
rather the backbone around which the career of the student at Euromed is crafted.
The four dimensional pedagogical model designed - concepts, applications, competencies
and personal development - with the definite goal to support the students to move from
the concepts/applications dimensions into the competencies/leaderships dimension, is a
well thought choice. Euromed aims to deliver potential managers that are indeed able
to make the difference in their companies or in the wider society. In our concept it is
clear that as long as students only have a (thorough) knowledge and experience of
methods, methodologies and applications, they often do not get much further than
copying what the others also do. The difference is in fact made by the manager that
knows him/herself, is aware of his strengths and weaknesses, is self-aware and is able
to judge its responsibility, but after all is able and willing to realise “his dream”. A
manager without a vision, without an intrinsic motivation, will not be able to conduct his
company to a higher level of inspiration. Particularly in the knowledge based society,
where innovation and intrapreneurship are key, human qualities make the essential
difference.
Therefore, we consider personal development not as just another course, but as the
backbone concept of our programs. We are convinced that concepts and theories,
without any change in personality, have no effect on the student. In order to
materialize what that means in practice for the students I’ll take the ESC program as
illustrative example. The students arrive, in principle after two years “classe prepa” in
the bachelor’s year of the ESC program. In the two preparatory years, they have dealt
mainly with theory (concepts and some applications). The aim of the ESC program is,
besides giving the necessary management techniques, insights and strategic visionary
competence, to develop the personality of the “future manager”. In fact the aim of the
program is to assist the student to “realize what you are” which in French has more
body and sounds like “reussier ce que l’on est”. We assist the student to develop the
best of what he is and what he wants to be and/or become. The ultimate aim of our
ESC program is not in the first place to find an interesting job, but to raise the
student’s employability: the capacity to find a job, to continuously learn, to get to selfrealization and to be able to reorient at any moment in his career. Indeed, in the first
place that means finding an interesting job after studies, but it goes much beyond that
short term goal; at least if we succeed in our aim. That gives the necessary importance
to the personal development trajectory, for which we have developed and
operationalized a number of tools.
The overall concept, from the student’s point of view, can be visualised as follows. In
parallel with the necessary courses (both core courses and electives) a number of steps
help the student to realize his employability. In the beginning of the three year cycle,
more attention is given to the course work (including a course on personal development
tools: Metizo), where as in the last two years the personal development component
gradually gains importance and becomes more individualised. The personal development
project starts with the identification of the student’s “dream”, his personal project, his
ambition. Though this is easily said, as we all know it is not easy to identify. In order
to help the student in this important and difficult endeavour, the students follow a
personal development course, focusing on the necessary tools that the students need to
define their “dream” and in later stages to help realize it.
Personal development in the ESC program
My first job
PRO-ACT Employ: My employability
Electives
PRO-ACT Professional Electives
Recherche Experiences
Core courses
Year 1
Core courses
Metizo (30h)
na
l
rso
Personal
Development
Plan
PRO-ACT
Elective 1
De
ve
Core courses
Pe
Year 2
lop
me
nt
(Virtual) PRO-ACT PRO-ACT
CoachingInternational Elective 2
Electives
Pla
n
Year 3
Core courses
My dream, my personal project, my ambition
The Metizo course further helps to write the student’s personal development plan. This
personal development plan is a kind of a project in which the student continuously keeps
track of his learning experiences, his development, his adapted goals, etc. This plan in
self-reflective, evolutionary and can be used as a communication device (in his contacts
with other students, coaches, the program management). But above all, the continuously
adapting plan constitutes at the end of the project the best course book personal
development, adapted to each individual.
In order to have a consistency between recruitment, learning and final evaluation, an
evaluation grid has been designed, identifying the necessary management competencies
that we expect the students to acquire. A somewhat simplified version of this grid is
used by the jury’s during the oral part of the entry exams (concours). Together with
the exam grades, it makes the final grade for the entry exam. The same grid, but now
enriched, is used as the basis for the student’s “personal development plan”. The
students use this grid in order to develop their personal project, the necessary steps to
undertake, the competencies that need specific attention, and the path (the projects),
that the student is going to undertake in order to realize his personal development
goals. Continuous self-evaluation and reporting are based on this grid. It is again the
same grid that is used during the final oral defence of the entire curriculum followed
(“le grand oral”), where we expect the student to present and/or defend his
employability. Along with the course grades, that remain of course important, an equal
attention is given to the much broader aspect of personal development, leading to an
enhanced employability. In this way, always using the same grid, we have an idea of the
successfulness of the program and the impact the program has had on the student.
The personal development plan is a software supported personal file, accessible by the
student, the program management, the professors and coaches. After the initial step
of constituting the personal development file, a number of assignments need to be
undertaken by the students. The aim of all these is always and each time, to contribute
to the personal development plan. It is up to the student, for instance, to show the
PRO-ACT team in what a particular project that the student chooses (and that can be
chosen rather freely), contributes to his personal development plan, what will be
learned, what is the value added, in what does it contribute to which competencies.
The tools available to the students, but also mandatory during the ESC program are
(other than Metizo and the personal development plan):
 Two elective PRO-ACT, which the student can undertake in different fields
(arts, sports, humanitarian activities, etc.). A PRO-ACT is a “project-action”, a
project in which action and learning is essential. Hence it is not enough just to
make an interesting study, and a “should do” plan, but rather it should always end
up in a realization: a “to do” plan, that needs to be executed. A PRO-ACT starts
from the necessary reflection in respect to the contribution of a possible PROACT to the personal development plan, the design of a project plan, the
execution of it, the evaluation, and eventually the contribution to the personal
development. Possibly, the overall personal development plan gets adapted, and
extended.
 A PRO-ACT internship (6 months), which is a PRO-ACT undertaken in a company,
with the particular aim to contribute to the personal development plan and to
gain some real life corporate experience.
 A PRO-ACT international (6 months), which consists of a mandatory stay of at
least 6 months in a different culture and by preference language. Needles to
stress that the aim of this PRO-ACT is to contribute to the necessary
sensitivity to the diversity of the (corporate) world, and to experience how to
deal with it. This PRO-ACT can take the form of either a semester at a foreign
university, or an internship abroad.
 A PRO-ACT research, which consists of a research project.
 Personal coaching, particularly in case that the student encounters difficult and
important moments of choice. Often, these moments relate to the more
emotional development of the students.
 Particularly in the ESC program, the curriculum is highly individualized. The first
year consists of 60 credits of (mainly) core courses. The second and third year,
however, can be completely individualized by the student. The only mandatory
part is 30 ECTS in additional core courses, but they can be taken whenever
during the two years. The other 120 ECTS can both in timing and content be
chosen, provided they contribute to the personal development plan. Therefore,
the list of more than 120 electives can be used to contribute precisely what is
necessary for the student.
Of course, the courses and the personal development only make sense if they go hand in
hand. Nevertheless, if we would try to quantify the ratio courses/personal development
and this as an example again for the ESC program, from the 210 ECTS, roughly half is
accumulated via personal development oriented activities.
Student evaluation in line with the pedagogical model
Since the Euromed pedagogical approach is what we would like to call enriched, we have
to pay attention that the students’ evaluation is adapted to that pedagogical model. Of
course students get grades on their course work, but an important part of the
evaluation (and again I take the ESC program as example) is based on the “grand oral”,
an oral defence of the complete curriculum, annex PRO-ACT activities, that the student
has undertaken. The aim of the “grand oral” is that the student explains and possibly
defends how he has increased his employability and how this looks like at the end of the
program in front of a jury. Furthermore, we would like to use an approach in which the
evaluation criteria at the oral entry exams, the criteria for the follow up of the
personal development path and the eventual “grand oral” are in principle the same. Not
only does that seem coherent, but it also allows us to visualise the progress of the
student, in an area that was before difficult to evaluate.
Based on the pedagogical model designed and explained earlier, we have designed an
evaluation grid, based on what we have identified as the necessary and desired
managerial competencies necessary for the future manager. That grid is used for the
entry exam (a summarised version) and the defence of their Pro-Act Employ (final
defence).
Competencies can have a more action oriented focus (what can I do with it), a more
relationships oriented focus (colleagues, employees, clients) or a more personal
orientation (how does it impact my behaviour). Though we have for each of the
competencies these three dimensions, we will not elaborate any further on that here.
This approach perfectly fits the vision of the school, as well as its translation into the
programs. Using this grid gives us a coherence between vision – program – selection of
students – final evaluation.
The grid of competencies proposed for the (ESC) students “required” to graduate are
grouped under the following headings: savoir (to know), savoir faire (to know how to do),
savoir être (to know how to be), savoir devenir (to know how to become). Most of the
competencies have some more detailed sub-criteria.
The future
Whereas today management education is still mainly oriented to the transfer of
concepts and applications, the future of management education is clearly into supporting
much more the development of the intrinsic competencies and personality of the
“learner”. Furthermore, the somewhat artificial “scientification” of management theory
has created a gap between management education and management practice that
increasingly puts management education outside companies, where indeed it should be
integral part of corporate practice. We are currently witnessing an evolution that
attempts to integrate management learning more into the companies itself, via the so
called corporate universities. This evolution can only intensify. These two tendendies
have two important consequences.
Instead of a curriculum consisting of functional courses (marketing, strategy, finance,
etc), a management curriculum will consist of a set of competencies to be developed
(decision making, managing in diversity, etc). Not by accident, this fits the interest of
companies to increase the focus on their own internal management of competencies,
indeed as a part of their knowledge management approach. This development of
competencies is easiest acquired via a learning-by-doing pedagogy, during which the
students make a continuous, coached, follow-up of the evolution of their competency
development. Functional courses, if not “readily available” via virtual learning platforms,
are only input for the competency development process. Assessment is based on an
evolutionary and dynamic competency grid and on the manifest prove of developed
competencies.
The second dimension of this evolution is the fact that this approach not only perfectly
fits the competency driven management that becomes increasingly important in
companies, but can only, due to its active pedagogy (learning-by-doing) be easily
translated into workplace learning (learning-while-doing). The business school of the
future will be a pedagogical approach oriented on competency development, rather than
a building and courses. In bringing management education onto the workfloor, we have
the opportunity to marry competency development, knowledge management and learning
into one continuous interacting process, installed inside the companies, working on
company related projects. On top of the anticipated learning, the projects might have
an immediate utility for a company.
Management learning integrates seamlessly into knowledge management and takes place
in the heart of the action: the company. Indeed we have transformed schools into
learning and we might finally address the justified comments of an increasing number of
companies on the very relative value of MBAs.
References
Baets W, Complexity, Organisations and Learning: a quantum interpretation of business,
Routledge, 2006
Baets W and Van der Linden G, The Hybrid Business School: developing knowledge
management through management learning, Prentice Hall, 2000
Baets W and Van der Linden G, Virtual Corporate Universities: A matrix of knowledge
and learning for the new digital dawn, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003
Le Monde de L’Education, Penser les savoirs du XXI siecle, juillet-aout, 2006
Wilber K, A brief history of everything, Gateway, 2001