Innovation in education technology has been an important means to enable the shift toward a more personalized approach to teaching and learning. Personalized education addresses the increasing number of challenges institutions face while trying to operate a traditional educational model for a tech-savvy generation, such as disengagement, achievement gaps, and frequent drop outs. 

Individualized learning offers students optional learning styles with the choice to excel in areas they are most interested in, progressing at their own pace. Personalization allows all students to succeed without time constraints, with the goal of instilling a deeper, more meaningful grasp of subject matter.  

Having access to reliable, comprehensive data regarding each student’s prior and present academic performance, attendance, discipline reports, and personal interests provides educators and academic advisors the information they need to guide students to choose goals that interest them and are realistic for them to achieve.  

Keeping in touch

Frequent communication has been shown to be one of the top criteria for increased retention rates. Providing students with an academic advisor for one-on-one conferences is a practice that results in overall improvements in academic achievement, eventually raising graduation rates. This important practice is more likely to occur if the institution’s management system offers a tool for easy scheduling, both for faculty and students. 

During conferences, advisors can work with students to create an individualized learning plan or ILP to document their goals, with a plan of action for attaining them. The ILP can be uploaded to a platform where it will be accessible to the student throughout their academic career to update and use as a roadmap to to see how they are progressing toward meeting those goals. 

Learners of all ages can benefit from having a mentor with whom they can voice their interests and dreams, and to help them make strategic career decisions. College students in particular need someone, besides their parents, who has knowledge of their personal academic data, and who will listen to their personal goals and help them make important life decisions in which they are most likely to succeed.  

A personalized plan

Personalization requires educators to tailor their instruction and the learning experiences for each student. Faculty can evaluate metrics like pre-test scores from competency exams, persistent failure to log in or attend class, and low grades or poor completion rates to predict which of their students are most at risk of failure, and reach out to them before it’s too late. 

This data can be used in conjunction with alternative learning opportunities, such as projects or internships aimed at increasing engagement for students with different learning styles, while simultaneously providing more challenging stretch-assignments for those who consistently meet their goals.

Tailoring learning

Some other important tools that enable educators to juggle the challenge of allowing learners to progress on different learning tracks include management of anytime starts, academic pacing, access to test scores, and personalized learning plans, all in a single, comprehensive platform that is easily accessible to both students and advisers.   

Additionally, the ability to offer competency-based learning provides even more opportunities for personalization, with rapid achievement of subject mastery in areas where students excel, especially for returning students who may have some work experience. Competency based learning requires tools that can import standards or criteria for mastery, and associate outcomes and rubrics with assignments, as well as a gradebook, with the flexibility for mastery-based grading.  

A comprehensive management system that offers a complete set of tools will make the evolution back to a personalized setting akin the one-room schoolhouse (a class of diverse students all working at varying stages of learning) a workable reality in today’s fast-paced educational environment.  

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Directors and trustees at our nation’s universities and colleges face four seemingly impossible tasks:

1. Provide a world-class education that prepares the future leaders of America with a well-rounded foundation of knowledge, learning, and smarts
2. Resolve both short-term and long-term issues in a transparent, forward-looking manner
3. Work in a regulatory environment that is overly complex
4. Answer to multiple constituencies that are all passionate and focused (i.e., faculty, staff, students, alumni, community groups)

On top of these near-impossible tasks, boards and trustees are managing an ongoing state of digital transformation. As better connection, insights, and management in the boardroom evolve from “nice-to-have” to “must-have,” digital transformation is enabling boards and trustees to successfully carry out their mission cheaper, faster, and with more efficiency. 

The centerpiece of digital transformation is an underpromoted yet critical software platform: board management software (often called “a board portal”).

Staying organized

A board portal is a software platform used to assist all aspects of corporate board management. From preparing and distributing board books to providing a secure environment for sharing documents and communications, board portals are specifically designed to help board members and professionals stay organized, make timely decisions, and plan and conduct meetings effectively.

The benefits of a board portal are immediate and impactful. 

It allows for effortless collaboration, putting everything in one place without having to rely on back-and-forth emails, cumbersome attachments, or unsecured channels like SMS and social media. 

Board portals increase board engagement by evolving meetings from dry and slow operational presentations, into strategic working sessions focused on addressing the issues that matter most. They also allow boards to solve problems more quickly by allowing them to handle more issues between meetings, leaving facetime for “roll-up-the-sleeves” style work.

A board portal can help boards and trustees meet the standards for legal compliance. It also helps secure an institution of higher education’s treasure trove of personal information Security can often an afterthought, which is why a modern board portal has strong security built into the platform.

Changing the game

As reputational and regulatory issues continue consuming attention in this space, universities and colleges are faced with an ever-growing list of responsibilities. Getting everything done can seem impossible. That’s why board management software is a real game-changer.

Ultimately, the right software empowers leaders of higher education with the technology they need to make intelligent and informed decisions that help achieve their institution’s strategic goals.

The post The Benefits of Board Management Software for Higher Education Institutions appeared first on Education and Career News.

In the world of educational institutions, it’s an exciting time to be an advancement professional — someone who works in alumni relations, advancement services, communications, fundraising, and marketing.

Advancement professionals have the pleasure and responsibility of working at the critical intersections between their institutions and the communities they serve. They engage alumni and supporters in the life of their institutions. They communicate the life-changing stories their schools deliver, including profound research advances, personal student transformations, and powerful community service. 

Advancement professionals ensure people know, value, and support this important work. They also work closely with people who want to give their time and financial support to help these schools, colleges, and universities succeed.  

Fruits of their labor

Charitable giving reached record levels in 2018. According to the Council for Advancement and Support of Education’s annual Voluntary Support for Education survey, people gave nearly $47 billion in charitable gifts to education in the United States.  

But where does this money go and how does it help? 

First, let’s talk about why people give. People give to education because they believe it transforms lives. People give when they feel passionate about working with others to make a difference, and they are inspired by dedicated and visionary institutions. They invest their own resources in institutions where they have connections with people they respect, know, and trust to ensure their gift achieves its purpose. 

Second, let’s look at how people give. Voluntary contributions come in two basic categories: capital purpose and current operations. Both methods provide vital resources to educational institutions. 

Where the gifts go

Capital purpose gifts are often for endowments, which are permanent funds from charitable gifts that offer schools, colleges, and universities the enduring stability to empower generations of students and shape our world’s future. When we look at endowment contributions, the leading use of these gifts (37 percent) is funding student financial aid. These contributions enable the institution to provide scholarships of many different kinds for deserving students in programs across the institution over many years. An institution’s “endowment” is a collection of hundreds to thousands of funds set up to support those programs and purposes. This type of giving helps institutions provide financial stability and certainty over time. Capital gifts can also fund things like buildings and equipment (think research facilities, laboratories, and the like).

Current operations gifts are designed for use that year to fund student scholarships, faculty research, and other types of direct and immediate support for the institution. Of the nearly $47 billion given to educational institutions in the United States last year, $27.4 billion of that was given for current purposes: direct support for academic divisions, such as the work of teaching, research, and scholarship in academic units; research, where giving advances specific research projects and activities; and student financial aid, providing vital scholarships and other forms of aid.

The goal of giving

Overall, giving helps schools, colleges, and universities achieve their missions. It provides resources to fund more than 10 percent of institutional expenditures each year, and this percentage is even higher for private colleges and universities. These funds are necessary for providing profound benefit to us all. 

Advancement professions play a major role in sustaining the vitality of educational institutions worldwide, and CASE is proud of the many roles we play in strengthening the profession. From internships for current undergraduates, to graduate residency programs, to our management institutes and other programs for advancement leaders, a spectrum of opportunities awaits professionals in all disciplines at all levels.

While there are incidents of controversy in regard to philanthropy, it’s crucial to understand that the vast majority of those who give to colleges and universities do so because they believe in the institution’s mission and want to make a difference in advancing education. They give because they know and trust that those institutions change lives. 

As we enter the season of giving, remember that we all benefit from the tradition of generosity that exists in this country and around the world.

The post Why It’s an Exciting Time to Be an Advancement Professional appeared first on Education and Career News.

However, the change-making potential of analytics remains largely unrealized at most colleges and universities. Institution-wide adoption is slow, or lacks appropriate financial or leadership support; results are not shared or campus stakeholders don’t understand how to link results to action. 

How can college and university leaders more effectively harness the promise and power of analytics to tackle big challenges, and take advantage of emerging opportunities?

Saving higher education

In a shared call to action, the Association for Institutional Research (AIR), EDUCAUSE, and the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) urge higher education leaders to act now to better leverage data and analytics for the benefit of students and their institutions. The joint statement “Analytics can save higher education. Really.” emphasizes six core principles that lay the groundwork for effective implementation, and sustained use of data and analytics as part of a data-informed institutional culture.

1. Go big: Make an institutional commitment to analytics. 
2. Invest what you can: You can’t afford not to. 
3. Analytics is a team sport: Build your dream team. 
4. Analytics has real impact on real people: Avoid the pitfalls. 
5. Prepare: Be ready for some detours on the road to success. 
6. Tick-tock, tick-tock: The time to act is now. 

The joint statement explains that leveraging data and analytics for better decisions requires collaboration. Implementing analytics throughout an institution will likely result in a few bumps along the way, so those who lead implementation — including senior leaders, and the faculty and staff on the front lines who are directly educating and supporting students — need to be prepared. Only then can an institution develop the technical infrastructure, processes, and resources to produce accessible, high-quality data, and to educate users on its effective and ethical use. 

In action

Some forward-looking institutions are already using data and analytics as strategic assets to transform their institutional cultures, and increase the success of all students.

The University of North Texas (UNT), for example, uses data, analytic tools, and predictive analytics to help with the institution’s strategic priorities. In response to a year with little to no growth in new student enrollment, the school’s data, analytics, and institutional research office partnered with colleagues from the enrollment management and finance offices to examine how to optimize and incentivize more potential students who were accepted to UNT as new students. 

After a rigorous analysis and careful consideration of potential solutions by a team of stakeholders from across the institution, new strategies were implemented in the next academic year. Results included the largest freshman class in UNT history and a 3 percent growth in overall student enrollment.

“At a time when higher education is already beginning to see pressures around enrollment, our experience is that analytics can and did help us succeed,” said Jason Simon, UNT’s assistant vice president of data, analytics, and institutional research. “But that is because we chose to embrace its capabilities. UNT is now enrolling over 39,000 students for the first time in our history. Ultimately, analytics was a major element of this success.”

Leveraging technology

In New York, Ithaca College is embracing a data-informed institutional culture. Since 2016, Ithaca has transformed its institutional research and information technology offices from disconnected functions with little interaction, to closely aligned strategic partners under new and future-focused leadership. The two offices are now working together to advance cutting-edge technology that includes data storage infrastructure with the tools necessary to create predictive models, and machine learning mechanisms to perform predictive analysis in real time for users. 

Beyond the technology, Ithaca also invested in data privacy, a critical feature of the growing use of analytics. A data inventory and security audit allowed the college to better understand what data it has, where data is located, how data is secured, and how the college should protect it. A campus-wide, two-tiered data governance system ensures secure, accurate, and accessible data for the college community.

“Professionals within institutional research provide a unique function as ‘data sense-makers’ and should be the center of data-informed actions,” said Yuko Mulugetta, chief analytics officer at Ithaca College, “including asking mission-critical questions, developing advanced models, interpreting analysis results correctly, revealing data insights, and telling data-informed stories to the campus.” 

Learning from data

These data-informed stories and interpretations illustrate potential opportunities, inequities, and gaps that might exist at other colleges and universities. The stories data tell allow individuals across an institution to better understand and prepare for future trends and changes that influence the success of their students and institutions. 

Higher education leaders can make a difference by actively embracing the power and promise of data and analytics for better decision-making, and empowering others across their institutions to use the information as well. Data and analytics are powerful tools, and using them properly can truly create a brighter future for higher education.

The post Why Analytics Can Save Higher Education appeared first on Education and Career News.

What role can the private sector play in supporting K-12 school districts, colleges and nonprofits to scale up the workforce? Models such as McDonald’s English Under the Arches program and Walmart’s GEDWorks program are examples of companies supporting its workforce to provide basic education and job training to adults in their communities. But smaller companies can make great strides as well by partnering with public sector workforce and education organizations.

Dakota Provisions, a processing facility in Huron, South Dakota, partnered with Cornerstones Career Learning Center’s English Language Acquisition program to help its employees improve their language skills and become not just better employees, but more fully integrated community members.

Together, adult education providers and private sector partners must rally around helping the tens of millions of adults in America who cannot read, or who need help to master basic math or earn real-world job skills and industry certifications. With basic education, we can contain social-service spending, rebuild the middle class and grow America’s businesses and economy.

The post How the Private Sector is Helping Adults Attain a Basic Education appeared first on Education and Career News.

Mark W.S. Chun, Ph.D.

Academic Director of Executive Education, Pepperdine Graziadio Business School

What are some of the biggest challenges that business leaders face today? What areas of business seem to be lacking due to underdeveloped leadership?

While understanding and utilizing technology is essential in managing a lucrative business, it isn’t enough. Successful, forward-thinking leaders must leverage and celebrate the distinctive ethical values in their employees including their creativity, synthesis, collaboration, judgment and diversity of thought. Next, they must constantly evolve as intelligent leaders to encompass analytical reasoning, digital know-how, heightened mindfulness and interpersonal skills. And last, they should promote new combinations of humanity and machine to pioneer innovative business ideas, models and solutions.

How do your executive education programs help leaders overcome these challenges and continue to grow their businesses?

Our programs emphasize the application of industry-specific, leadership strategies to overcome real-world business challenges currently facing today’s market. Our students experience transformational, values-centered learning through small, collaborative classes and personalized mentorship, allowing them to reach their greatest potential as entrepreneurial-driven, “best for the world” leaders.

What are the three most important skills that business people and students will emerge with after participating in one of these programs?

Participants of our degree and non-degree programs not only sharpen their business approach, but emerge as strong, entrepreneurial-based leaders with ethical decision making, critical thinking skills, and a global perspective.

Dr. Nancy R. Mansfield

Director of WomenLead and Professor of Legal Studies, Georgia State University

What are some of the biggest challenges that business leaders face today? What areas of business seem to be lacking due to underdeveloped leadership?

Many of the challenges leaders face today are familiar – understanding the threats and opportunities presented by evolving technology, designing and executing on a strategy that wins the war for talent, and anticipating the impact of moves by traditional and unconventional competitors around the globe have and will continue to require the lion’s share of a leader’s time and energy.  Over the past year, however, global political circumstances have begun to add complexity to leadership.  Threats of trade wars and concomitant tariffs, as well as shifting geopolitical alliances, create significant uncertainty in an area that had been, for most of the globe, fairly predictable.  To be successful, future leaders – at virtually all levels of the organization – will need to have even greater awareness and even savvy when it comes to understanding how politics is becoming a much less predictable component of the business environment. 

At the same time, leaders are increasingly finding their businesses visibly enmeshed in social issues.  More than ever, stakeholders are aware of and potentially troubled by, for example, the personal behavior of executives (e.g., Travis Kalanick, Bill O’Reilly) or the misdeeds attributed to a dysfunctional organizational culture (e.g., United Airlines, Wells Fargo).  The opportunities for a leader or their business to take reputational hits has increased dramatically with the rise of social media.  

It isn’t clear today that our efforts to prepare business leaders has sufficiently addressed these new sources of complexity and uncertainty.  At Robinson, we believe this broadening set of daunting leadership challenges is better addressed through a more diverse set of lenses.  For that reason, we have committed to an effort to prepare the women in our programs for leadership responsibility. 

As it stands, despite earning 60 percent of collegiate degrees conferred today and comprising a majority of the workforce, women remain severely underrepresented in leadership positions in corporate, STEM, and government settings.  Furthermore, it is quite possible some of these issues could have been avoided or ameliorated had women been more highly represented in leadership roles within organizations.

Georgia State University’s WomenLead Program seeks to close the pervasive gender equity gap by empowering young women to aim for leadership roles. Unlike other leadership programs around the country directed toward women, Georgia State’s program is targeted to undergraduates, to give these students the idea and the confidence to strive for leadership roles prior to them launching into their careers.  Often times leadership programs for women are targeted to MBA students, or to mid-career professionals – those who may have already made decisions that may have made it harder or perhaps impossible for them to continue to seek a leadership role in the future. 

A fundamental premise of WomenLead is to engage students early, before they begin their careers, to seed the ideas and the strategies that will be necessary to strive for roles of influence at some point in one’s career. WomenLead offers educational programming and professional signature experiences for Georgia State’s students and fosters outreach to the Atlanta business, government, and nonprofit communities. Based in the Robinson College of Business, WomenLead serves the entire Georgia State community. Now more than ever, companies are recognizing the importance of hiring women candidates who will be strong future leaders. They are sponsoring women’s leadership programs and initiatives in far greater numbers. The Robinson College of Business is participating in this national movement by creating a pipeline of talent for business, STEM and government sectors. By doing so we are doing the right thing for the school, for our students, and for the future of business.

How does your program help to create leaders, who will ultimately overcome challenges and continue to grow their businesses?

We feel strongly that successful leaders will need to have had two sorts of experiences during their academic program.  First, future leaders will need to have developed an elevated capability for recognizing and diagnosing the impacts that political, economic, social and technological forces might present as threat or opportunity to their business.  Second, future leaders will need to have repeatedly practiced the application of abstract theories and models on data and problems that are as multifaceted and ambiguous as those to which they will expected to attend as leaders so that they can gain confidence in both their technical skills and in their emotional skills before graduating. 

Launched in 2015, WomenLead provides high-achieving undergraduate students (3.3 GPA or better) with opportunities in and out of the classroom that encourage them to strive for top leadership roles across business, science, nonprofit, and government sectors. Students who take the course come from four of Georgia State’s colleges, representing 39 majors. Beginning in their sophomore year and following them through graduation and beyond, WomenLead is one of a few undergraduate women’s leadership programs at a major research university. Students can choose between three distinct for-credit courses across different areas: WomenLead in Science, WomenLead in Policy and Politics, and WomenLead in Business.

The core curriculum focusses on students building confidence in themselves, building confidence in their work, and building confidence in community. We achieve these goals in a consistent manner across all three courses while also allowing focus on the different subject areas across the university.  The WomenLead courses, taught by tenured professors in legal studies, marketing, biology and political science, emphasize opportunities for a high-degree of collaboration among faculty and students and offer students signature leadership development experiences through an on-site corporate visit, a power networking event, exposure to invited speakers, and interviews with community leaders.  The course culminates in a final leadership poster presentation event where students present their personal takeaways from the course and strategies for development for the future.  This assignment and the WomenLead course require reflection, self-examination, intuition and intellect, inspiration and courage. Alumni of the course then become members of WomenLead, and are encouraged to remain active in the program and with the next cohorts of students until they graduate.

What are the three most important skills that business people and students will emerge with after participating in one of these programs?

WomenLead’s goal is to unlock the full potential of our highly talented  and diverse student body and to place each member on a trajectory for lifelong success.  The program exposes students to pathways to leadership positions and incorporates a curriculum focused on three pillars: confidence in self, confidence in the professional world of work and confidence in the community and making a positive impact.  Research shows that success correlates just as closely with confidence as it does with competence and the good news is that with work, confidence – “the stuff that turns thoughts into action” — can be acquired. 

For our students (of whom over 60 percent are first generation college students), building confidence is compelling and the most important skill in shaping their ability to chart their course at the university and beyond, to aspire to leadership roles and to attain those roles.  Students’ growth of confidence stimulates action on many fronts and, in turn, bolsters their belief in their ability to succeed. So confidence accumulates—through hard work, through success, and even through failure.

Our students often say “One of the best things I’ve gained from and love about WomenLead is confidence in myself as a person, student, and women in the world of business.”  Armed with confidence, they generate their own leadership voice, gain the skills to inspire and motivate others and to solve problems in the workplace – all important skills for business.

What do you think the future of continued education looks like?

As a leadership team of the college, we start from the proposition that we live in a unique moment in time – one of immense possibilities. We find this underlying premise useful for the decisions we make about how to best to position the college to be a resource for business in the coming age as it reminds us to not only consider solutions to our current pressures that iterate on the status quo, but to also consider solutions and structures for a future that may discretely depart from the past. 

We contend one overarching shortfall for business education is the current disconnect between the labor market that many business educators want to prepare people for and the actual needs of today’s labor market and the yet-to-be-imagined jobs of the future. Specifically, vastly more powerful information and communication technologies are dramatically reducing the number of people that businesses must employ to engage in the mechanically-intellectual work of managing processes, accounting for transactions, controlling distribution systems, or any number of other jobs for which business schools have traditionally prepared our students to enter. Instead, an increasing number of machines and devices will make sure that organizations stay on task. Thus, the work that remains to be done by future employees will focus less on management or administration, and more on entrepreneurial value creation with an innovation mindset. Thus, one aspect of the future of education will be to ensure our graduates are more adaptive, more agile, and highly comfortable with digital technologies that will be necessary to create value and run the organizations of the future. 

A second aspect of the future of education will be the on-demand nature of education and the ability and need to tailor instructional methodology to individual learning outcomes. Students of the future will be digital natives, comfortable with technology, needing to learn in formats best suited for the task at hand. No longer will class be dominated by lecture. Instead courses will be designed and delivered using a combination of delivery modes, with each modality carefully chosen and tailored to the specific learning outcome the instructor desires their students to master.  Course design will become an art and a science, no longer the domain of an individual instructor. Instead, course design and delivery will become a team sport with the players to include the faculty member, the instructional designer, the graphic designer, the videographer, the online student success coach, and many others. 

There is a bright future for business schools focused on understanding how individuals interact and work together to best contribute to the development of new ideas and the deployment of approaches that are essential for progress and success. Schools that take on grand societal challenges using students and faculty leveraging new technologies are excited places to be. The journey from ‘business administration’ to ‘value creation’ is just getting underway, and it is a very exciting one for the schools that choose to fully embrace it.

Bill Pearce

Assistant Dean for Instruction, University of California Berkeley’s Haas School of Business

What are some of the biggest challenges that business leaders face today? What areas of business seem to be lacking due to underdeveloped leadership?

Learning agility is critical for all leaders. How do I get the skills I need when the pace of the game is changing faster than ever? At Berkeley Haas, one of our defining leadership principles is “students always”. We are a community designed for curiosity and lifelong pursuit of personal and intellectual growth. Business is not a place for those who feel they have learned all they need to learn.

How do your executive education programs help leaders overcome these challenges and continue to grow their businesses?

The goal of the Berkeley MBA Program is to develop leaders who are both firmly grounded in the fundamentals of business and armed with a real set of innovative leader capabilities. Based on a set of specific skills valued by employers, the program’s rigorous curriculum is designed to teach essential management skills, while providing additional practical knowledge and experience that will enable them to thrive in a collaborative business environment. This helps develop leaders who work effectively with, and through, others.

The Berkeley MBA is anchored in the fundamentals of general management, including the latest theories and best practices in business. Berkeley Haas graduates learn to lead and manage an enterprise as a whole. The rigorous curriculum teaches requisite qualitative, quantitative, analytical, strategic and problem-solving skills. Our graduates not only gain knowledge about best business practices, but also learn about the fundamental principles behind them — the “how” and the “why.”

What are the three most important skills that business people andstudents will emerge with after participating in one of these programs?

1. Leadership: Leadership is a connective theme that runs through the entire Berkeley MBA, in both the required (core) and elective portions of the curriculum. The process starts with the careful selection of Berkeley MBA students, who have already demonstrated leadership and exemplify the school’s Defining Leadership Principles.
2. Problem solving: As soon as students arrive on campus they begin to learn the skills required to define opportunities. For example, we developed a course called Problem Finding, Problem Solving that teaches several modes of thinking — such as design thinking — in order to find, frame and solve difficult problems. Making students aware of new ways to critically evaluate problems is key to being able to answer the wickedly difficult problems that our society faces.
3. Emotional Intelligence: The Berkeley MBA Program is highly selective, and its graduates are sought after because they demonstrate not only a mastery of powerful quantitative and management tools, but also a solid understanding of best practices for the changing technological, global, and human dimensions of business. “Confidence without attitude” is another of our defining leadership principles. We teach our students to make decisions based on evidence and analysis, giving us the confidence to act without arrogance, thereby leading through trust and collaboration.

The post Overcoming Business Challenges With the Help of Higher Education appeared first on Education and Career News.

Organizations and industries are evolving faster than their executives. Changes in technology, economy and policy are impacting the way we do business. Therefore, senior managers and executives are returning to the classroom to brush-up on skills or learn new ones. Colleges and universities offer a variety of programs and workshops for individuals to invest in advanced education and leadership training on everything from astrophysics to business negotiations. Single courses, as well as complete degree programs, are opportunities for executives to learn new skills while also networking with other leaders. Programs like these ensure that companies have talented management to successfully lead businesses and employees.

Specific to needs

James Soto Antony, Faculty Director of the Higher Education Program for Harvard University, said, “Most universities now understand that having a broad impact — the kind that is in a scale that makes a big difference — requires strategies that go beyond what happens in traditional classroom and degree-program settings.” Antony teaches in one of Harvard’s programs that educates a variety of individuals on and off campus, and states that: “Executive and professional education opportunities allow a university to shape the development of a diverse array of people who otherwise would not come to that campus for a full-blown degree program. Executive programs can be timely, highly specific to a sector’s and an individual learner’s needs, and can be delivered using modalities that make learning convenient and highly accessible.”

Executive education programs are typically offered in two format types: short-term courses, which are sometimes called “business boot camps” and offer workshops and certificates,  or longer, multi-term degree-granting curricula. Executive education programs are designed for working professionals to develop needed skills in areas like leadership development, negotiation, strategy, finance and communication, although the offerings are endless. All the while, execs do not relinquish their day jobs while going back to school.

Flexible

Programs can be face-to-face, online or a hybrid of the two, like in the case of the Global Executive MBA at Duke University. April Morley, a recent graduate of the program, selected Duke’s option because of the flexibility for working professionals. She was able to continue working in Austin, Texas, while going to school in short-term international residency formats coupled with an online learning platform. April said, “After the Duke MBA, I find myself leading change at my company, not just within the scope of my role, but also seeing core challenges in our overall strategy and making an impact within many departments. I am able to see risks and discuss those risks with leaders across the organization to ensure we are successful as a company in the short and long term.”

According to the National Center of Education Statistics, it is estimated that more than a million people are taking executive education courses, although these numbers are not counted like traditional degree granting programs. Antony also mentioned that, “At Harvard, it is estimated that — university-wide — nearly 100,000 people from around the world are educated annually through the executive education offerings of our faculty.” Executive education is growing rapidly to keep up with the profound changes in business today.

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Through a joint effort with LinkedIn, the Executive MBA Council  fielded a survey that aimed to determine just that. What we found was a combination of surprises as well as things we were anticipating. After polling a global sample of over 1,000 alumni of Executive MBA (EMBA) programs, here’s what we learned.

First, 72 percent of the respondents indicated that their EMBA program had a positive impact on their career; meaning it lead to a promotion, salary raise, increase in responsibilities, or career change, or that it assisted in starting a business. Based on our previous exit surveys, this good news was not surprising.

Here’s what was surprising

We asked survey respondents to rank seven factors in terms of their importance when deciding to enter an EMBA program. The most important items were core business knowledge and leadership and collaboration skills. Salary increases came in as the fifth reason, behind opportunities to do fulfilling work and ability to change one’s career trajectory.

When we asked respondents to rate how EMBA programs delivered on these pre-program decision factors, there was alignment for the top reasons as graduates felt the program delivered well in both core business knowledge and leadership and collaboration skills. Also interesting was the fact that there were no statistically significant differences along gender lines when it came to considering pre-program factors or assessing the resulting impact from the program.

We then went further and asked respondents to rank a series of skills in terms of their importance to their current job and responsibilities. Strategic decision-making skills ranked number one. When rating how impactful the EMBA program was in terms of their development of these skills, strategic decision-making skills was rated highest — showing alignment of importance and impact.

Invest smart

So what does this all mean? Professional development matters. Whether an individual leader or aspiring leader chooses to attend an EMBA program is not really the point. The main point is we each need to do something to increase our individual currency. Of all the investments we can make (stocks, bond, real estate, etc.), we have the most control over the return that comes from investing in our own development.

There is no educational offering that can guarantee success — that part falls to the individual leader. However, increasing our skills and knowledge-set raises our value and thus increases our chance of overall business success.

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We face a conundrum as the influence of a digital world directly impacts the effectiveness of leadership. For millennia, leadership was nearly an absolute. Either you had the skill or capability to lead, or you didn’t. And a lack of leadership skills became quickly evident to those who were expected to follow. However, today’s leaders can be disconnected from their workforce, and still remain in power.

Today’s chief executives have to look beyond profits and losses, as well as personal relationships with board members and shareholders, to include social responsibility, staff interaction and customer satisfaction in their portfolios. In these demanding times, the pipeline of future executives depends on timely, relevant and high-quality leadership development.

Born or made?

Is leadership an acquired skill or something that is innate? Debates around this question have raged for decades. My personal experience tells me that most leaders naturally possess the necessary qualities. That is, the ability to engage, inspire and motivate others. However, more is needed for leaders to be successful.

Research findings indicate that relationships, development and training can make all the difference in a manager’s success. As well as foundational qualities, other valued traits include  integrity, character, an ability to motivate and inspire, and a clear desire to take initiative. Circumstances and environment may also contribute to the development of distinctive styles of leadership. Military leaders, for example, are promoted only after demonstrating an ability to take command, win the respect of their team and maintain alignment with the goals of more senior officers. Because this model has worked for hundreds of years, many industry leaders and corporations have followed a similar approach.

Communication is key

In today’s digital-technical, gig economy, leadership skills include the ability to communicate effectively and build teams that have high degrees of satisfaction in their work. In many start-ups, leaders work among their colleagues in open office environments and have a transparency that was once elusive. Helping individuals to build confidence and achieve goals are keys to a company’s success. Quite often, leadership talent in many organizations is underutilized, but leadership training helps to identify those who possess promising qualities. Choosing the best way to pursue leadership development depends on the individual and the desired outcome.

Today, more leadership development programs are offered online as self-paced programs. While they can be effective, many of the best programs involve human interaction and the immediacy of learning, as you’re able to hear directly from experienced leaders and coaches about what motivates people to deliver their best work.

It takes heart

Going forward, leadership development will require as much of a focus on character and ethics as it will on process and control. With the exponential growth in artificial intelligence and machine learning, there will be a strong demand for continuous training and leadership development to help build the cadre of leaders that will inspire people to use their skills in innovative and rewarding ways.

Leadership development is a necessary and worthwhile endeavor for leaders to gain the vision and direction needed to deliver results with intellectual honesty, integrity and strategic thinking.

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Distributive leadership means developing leadership at every organizational level to acknowledge the contribution made by all staff — as the frontline staff of today will lead agencies tomorrow. According to Charmaine Brittain from the Butler Institute for Families at the University of Denver, “Leadership development has shifted from an executive-level focus to recognizing the importance of leadership development for all agency levels, which then provides the impetus to shift organizational culture.”

Constant learning​​​​​​​

An appreciation and focus on strengths is embodied in a distributive leadership approach and that, in turn, leads to a learning culture. Tracy Wareing Evans, President & CEO of the American Public Human Services Association states that, “Too often in our institutional thinking we want to believe that every organization is a learning organization, but in order to make that happen, we need to constantly be thinking about how staff learn and develop at all levels.” Leadership development is not “a course that you take once and are done.” Instead, “a learning culture requires a constant appreciation for differences, and should be a place where mistakes can be made safely and learning is encouraged,” adds Brittain. This thinking is in alignment with the reality of today’s workforce as it becomes more and more populated by the millennial generation.

According to the Pew Research Center, the millennial generation continues to assert their power in the workforce with over 56 million people, compared to 53 million from Generation X and 41 million Baby Boomers. Motivating this generation requires a different approach, including an emphasis on offering meaningful work, work-life balance, career development, effective preparation and a tech-savvy environment.

A new approach

Health and human service agencies must engage this generation differently and shift their expectations. Wareing Evans says, “We want them committed to the field, not to just one job.” Agencies that focus on distributive leadership and a learning culture will resonate with the millennial generation.

Health and human service agencies need to prioritize leadership development so that they can fulfill their missions serving vulnerable families and communities across the nation. As Wareing Evans states, “Leadership in the human services can be the cornerstone for how we can achieve thriving communities.”

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