Education Innovation: Queen’s University Belfast Aims to Offer the MBA of the Future

At Queen’s, MBA skills development is focused around our year-long leadership development module. The program emerged from employer feedback; we asked industry leaders about key skills gaps in the MBA students they encountered, and they told us that while students tended to be academically strong, they had concerns around their abilities in the softer areas of leadership. These included negotiation skills, ethical leadership, communication and resilience.

Built around addressing these areas, our leadership development program is targeted to each person’s specific needs. Through the year-long module, students learn more about themselves, their approach to teamwork, their communicative strengths and their weaknesses, along with their own leadership style. Guided by an individual coach and mentor, each person defines at the outset what they would like to work on during the year. The end goal is to encourage each person to develop the insight and self awareness required for effective leadership in a global context. Since we have a good mix of local and international students in our cohort, there is a wide mix of goals, strengths and perspectives, with all students benefiting from this international diversity.

Our academic program is somewhat different to other MBA offerings in Ireland and the UK, though it aligns with other top global universities, in that we have adopted a transversal approach. Students look at the principles and also the practice of key business topics, including marketing, strategy, finance, operations and economics.

But our MBA differs in that modules are not offered in a standalone, siloed manner, because real-life business practice does not work that way. Instead, modules build on each other, through developing specific mindsets. This means that subject specialisms are integrated. For example, strategy and organisational behaviour are brought together to solve real-life problems, including with a live consultancy client that works with students during the year.

Future MBAs will need to address the changing political, economic and business environment. This means that traditional methods for teaching management topics and skills need to change, for example through offering integrated teaching and new modules such as our core rethinking capitalism module. Co-teaching with partners from industry, but also non-profit organisations and those in the public sector, is vital for enhancing academic material, and we have already incorporated this into our new program.

MBA delivery is also moving towards online and digital options, and Queen’s is working towards this too. However, a key aspect of the value of an MBA is the contacts and connections one makes, and so any online program would need to carefully integrate such opportunities – something we’re very aware of as we develop courses for the future.

To find out more about the new MBA at Queen’s University Belfast, please visit the program website, email MBA Administrator Stephen Armstrong or call +44 (0)28 9097 4038.