Digitization, data breaches, privacy scandals—technology has never had more power to make or break a big business, and employers want to hire grads ready to navigate their businesses through the digital minefield.
According to the Graduate Management Admission Council’s (GMAC) latest Corporate Recruiters Survey, 71% of employers plan to place recent business school grads into data analytics roles in 2018.
Fitting then, that the brand-new Global Executive MBA program from NEOMA Business School is set to prepare grads for the tech-heavy future of work.
Launching later this year, the EMBA program—which comes in three different formats, ranging from seven to 15 months—is designed to equip students with both the hard and soft skills needed to reach the next stage in their careers, with courses in traditional subjects like team-building taught alongside more innovative, tech-focused subjects.
Among these, there is the ‘Managing Digital Disruption’ module, which covers artificial intelligence, blockchain, and big data to prepare grads for the changes these technologies will create in their industries.
This kind of flexible and varied teaching has the potential to take students far in their careers: according to GMAC, 88% of employers in Latin America reported a demand for data analytics-enabled grads, followed by 74% in Asia Pacific, and 69% in the US.
With such worldwide workplace opportunities available for business school grads with digital capability, it makes sense that tech training on the EMBA at NEOMA also spans the globe.
In addition to taking classes on the NEOMA Business School campus in central Paris, students on the Global EMBA also get to take part in International Learning Experiences in locations around the world—one of which is a fintech course in the US.
At Baruch College in New York City, Global EMBA students get the opportunity to learn about everything that’s going on at the cutting-edge of fintech development—from cryptocurrency to crowdfunding—in the fast-paced financial capital of the US.
This teaching takes place not only in the classroom, but also in focused conferences on topics such as blockchain, as well as field encounters with big stakeholders in finance in New York.
As the fintech course in New York proves, in these days of the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, the usefulness of a managerial understanding of technology is not confined to high-tech companies, but has huge applications elsewhere—and not only the financial industry.
Data analytics was among the top three job functions employers were planning to fill with new business school grads in 2018, according to GMAC, and the list of industries with data analytics-enabled grads at the top of their ‘most-wanted’ lists includes consulting; the ever-popular MBA career destination. The non-profit sector also showed a significant interest in analytics-savvy grads, with 61% of companies reporting intent to hire grads with this skillset.
At NEOMA Business School, the data analytics and tech modules that feature on the Global EMBA provide focal points of specialized knowledge amid a rich offering of traditional business teaching, building strong leaders from the ground-up.
This begins at the very outset of the course, when students take the Myers-Briggs personality test as part of an induction module that helps them bond with other members of their cohort.
This is followed by in-depth careers assessment and training and one-to-one guidance throughout the EMBA, not to mention timely training in corporate social responsibility as students move through the various phases of the course.
This sustained emphasis on personal development throughout the Global EMBA at NEOMA Business School ensures that the skills learnt during the specialist tech modules don’t merely constitute the accumulation of trivia, but instead are underpinned by an understanding of the impact of these technologies—not just to the life of an individual business, but to industries, economies, and society as a whole.
