The faculty and staff of the College of Business at Illinois State University met on August 18, 2011 for a retreat to recognize achievements for teaching, research, and service. In addition, new faculty were welcomed and introduced. A planned discussion then took place to address the following question:
What knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors will be important for the success of our graduates in 2030; and how should our curriculum evolve to reflect these important areas?
There will be some constants in the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and behaviors needed for success in 2030, but even the constants will morph into new perspectives. The importance of respect for individuals and other cultures, for example, will remain important. However, individuals and cultures keep changing, so continuing study and a dedication to recognize these gradual changes is important. The ability to write effectively for various audiences will continue to be important. Ethics will continue to play an important role and students will need to recognize that they will be repeatedly tested throughout their careers with ethical decisions that will not always have easy answers.
Collaboration across working groups, divisions, and regional partners will play an increasingly important role in 2030. Students and faculty should be prepared to understand how to collaborate in various ways (face-to-face, Skype, texting, telephone, Google Docs, cloud storage, and so on) and be a positive force for accomplishing goals while working with and depending on others. Thin client mobile communication devices will become increasingly dominant and ubiquitous which implies a growing expectation of immediacy in communication.
Students now learn to cooperate in a team setting, but collaboration is a more productive orientation that assumes cooperation and getting along together as a work unit. Collaboration implies adding knowledge and perspectives to a group that helps move the task ahead and add value. Collaboration is more than just getting along together as cooperation may imply. Team skills will become even more important in the coming decades. Educating teams to become mini learning organizations will add significant value to collaborative team efforts. The old model of waiting for a team project to end and then having team members complain bitterly about other team members is not optimizing human resources effectively. Understanding non-verbal cues in communication will increase in importance as a means to enhance successful collaboration.
Relationships will be increasingly purposeful and focused on accomplishing tasks and reaching goals. Relationships that exist in a distributed environment where some groups of people are working in different time zones and speaking different languages will heighten the complexities of being a manager in 2030.
The evaluation of student knowledge, attitudes, skills, and behaviors will need to evolve beyond simplistic scoring rubrics. Checking boxes on a scoring rubric may not be providing the feedback necessary to ensure real human development and growth. Students will benefit tremendously in the future, as they do now, from active learning and experiential learning. International study opportunities, community service projects, and internships that challenge the student to look at the world with a fresh perspective will help develop valuable flexibility in cognitive and affective skills to creatively meet future challenges. Students coming into the curriculum with a variety of life experiences will be able to more fully take advantage of their formal educational experience. As a business school we need to become more nimble in changing the curriculum. This means that we need to make thoughtful and deliberate changes to the curriculum with a sense of urgency.
A question facing professors is how do we rethink what we are doing to meet the challenges of what will be important for success in 2030? Knowledge will still be knowledge, but what we do with knowledge and how we apply knowledge, will change. It will be increasing important to properly recognize and frame a problem, understand of what knowledge is needed solve the problem, and then make timely decisions. What is taught and how good teaching is recognized and evaluated will need to change. Faculty and students will need to adapt to new learning models. For example, what is an “internship?” We have something in our mind when we say internship. Are there other models for experiential learning that do not fit neatly into our credit hour model of the world? How do we take full advantage of new options for mobility while also optimizing the known advantages of high quality face to face communication?
Technology is very fluid and will continue to evolve in the coming decades. Technology in general and information technology in particular will change markets. Individuals who recognize these emerging trends and have the skill sets to respond accordingly to these demands will be rewarded. There will be less paper but more information. The ability to read and think critically will continue to be important, yet the context will change and evolve.
Just-in-time knowledge will become increasing important and workers in 2030 will likely read more but in streams of multiple and rapid JIT chunks. There is concern that deeper exposure to longer more detailed writing and argumentation will diminish in perceived importance. If there is less single topic reading and more seemingly unrelated bits of information being processed, will this perhaps diminish the ability to think logically about complicated problems? The need for analytical thinking will become increasingly important.
Encouraging innovation among students will become increasingly important as creativity and entrepreneurial energy becomes more centrally important for organizations in the race to stay competitive (or perhaps just stay in business). People who can identify a passion will make greater contributions to organizations and to society. A fundamental element of a genuine education will mean that professors need to help students find those ideas for which they have passion.
It will become increasingly important for business students to recognize the challenge of personal financial planning. It is incumbent upon students and faculty to encourage personal financial planning in the face of the trend toward defined contribution retirement plans and diminished support from private and public pension and assistance programs. Similarly, taking personal responsibility to understand and act on wellness decisions will ensure that the individual can be a sustaining contributor to organizations and to society. These issues are too important to be
relegated to the list of skills, attitudes, and behaviors that we sometimes suggest are not within the domain of our curriculum.
Organizations will continue to become more global in their offerings and will therefore embrace a growing global perspective within their organizations. An international perspective needs to become a dominant theme and be a fundamental part of all aspects of the curriculum. Professors and students today should recognize that globalization will increasingly become the norm in the context of markets, sourcing, certifications, and operating processes. The need for multiple languages will increase rather than decrease with English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese being the dominant languages. Language is more than communicating simple instructions and articulating spreadsheets. Language involves understanding how others think. As such, students should be encouraged to become fluent in these and other languages if they expect to compete globally for top managerial positions.
Ethical decision making and the demand based mandate to internalize sustainable business models in a global context should become central parts of an emerging curriculum if the intention is to prepare students for work in 2030. However, as the curriculum becomes more international, an internationalized faculty will be required to understand and teach a world view. This world view perspective should become evident in assignments, skills development, and in the broader view of curriculum development. The concept of international will also increasingly focus on understanding and recognizing the growing importance of regionalized trading partners.
The business school will need to continue building closer alliances with potential employers. Day to day interaction with companies coming to campus and students interacting with companies off campus should become more commonplace. In this context, it should be a smooth transition from college to working in a company. Alumni networks to help students and alumni succeed will become increasingly important. Alumni mentoring, recruiting, and private financial support will grow increasingly important. Finally, a strong brand will be increasingly important in the face of potential educational consolidations, growing competition, and emerging methods of delivery for educational services.
