Business schools are under pressure to innovate teaching and course design in response to stakeholders’ priorities while also needing to remain financially stable. How can they allocate resources efficiently to create experiences that inspire students to become lifelong learners?

We spoke to Dr Rosalind Rae, Course Leader for the MSc Higher Education Management and Leadership at Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University, about the importance of investing in people’s skills.

Please introduce yourself and your career to date.

I have 10 years of industry experience working for organisations in the Food and Drink and Pharmaceuticals sectors across various management and leadership roles, including manufacturing, quality and vendor assurance, research and development, technical projects, logistics and distribution.

My master’s degree really inspired me to become a lifelong learner, and I loved being immersed in an environment where I could constantly learn, develop, challenge myself and work with like-minded people. I decided to continue with my learning journey to undertake a PhD at the University of Nottingham, focusing the research on a real-life challenge I had encountered during my time in industry. I have been in academia now for 20 years, with experience working across both post-92 and pre-92 Universities, leading and teaching Business School programmes.

What do you enjoy most about your role at Nottingham Business School?

First and foremost, I love learning, and secondly, I love designing and facilitating a learning environment that enthuses others to learn, develop, improve and become lifelong learners. Nottingham Business School is very entrepreneurial and applied with its approach to Higher Education. We take great pride in designing and delivering an excellent student experience. This involves creating a collaborative, experiential, applied and personalised learning journey.

We work with many public and private sector organisations to deliver ‘real-life’ learning experiences through our programmes, undertaking research on current issues that exist in organisations that need research to solve their problems through the application of knowledge to practice, and we bring this into the learning environment. This makes the learning ‘real’ and ‘come alive’; learners can immediately relate to the value and currency of what they are learning.

Most of my colleagues I work with have industry and sector experience outside Higher Education – this really helps with bringing in diverse perspectives, independent thinking, and innovative practices into the classroom, enabling us to challenge the status quo as part of our ‘normal practice’.  We work with a ‘continuous improvement mindset’.

We take a ‘tailored’ approach to student learning in that we make it very relevant to the student’s past, current and future work environment and offer choices for the students to focus on issues that are closest to their work context.

Our common purpose, to deliver a great student experience, involves sharing our knowledge and expertise as well as supporting each other in our work. Our uniqueness is very much focused on the applied nature of learning – so we bring together the latest research into our learning environments, and we translate that into how this can be used in practice to improve performance.

Why do you think the time is right to introduce a new MSc in Higher Education Management and Leadership at the exec-ed level?

It is important for every sector to have great quality people working in it, driving the performance of organisations forward – investment in people and upskilling is a key driver for this. Higher Education is a knowledge-driven business – our people are our ‘product’, and they deliver the competitive advantage, we need to invest and continually grow in our key assets that provide both the core service and all the essential support services that contribute to the success of these institutions.

For an organisation to be excellent, it requires everyone across the organisation to be performing to their best. If one part of the system is not performing well or they don’t work well together, then this impacts on the overall performance of the organisation.

I think this programme is extremely relevant for today’s climate, now more than ever, because of the continuing pressures we are facing as a sector on our finances and the increased competition across institutions; we should be leading the way in efficiency and effectiveness, innovation and sustainability.

By the very nature of the Business School, we are taking world-leading research and practices and utilising this knowledge to improve organisational practices through enabling and inspiring our learners. To enable us to do this, we need to also be doing this in our own institutions.

We have been working with the Association of Higher Education Professionals (AHEP) for a number of years now, and we felt the time was right to develop a new and exciting programme which uses current thinking and practices in management and leadership, taps into our expertise in management and leadership education and marries this with the resources, events, networks that AHEP can provide. We have an exclusive partnership with AHEP, which embeds AHEP’s commitments and values into the MSc as part of the learners programme of continuing professional development.

How is the programme relevant to today’s business landscape?

The HE sector is facing very similar pressures as other organisations in other sectors, it needs to ‘live within its means’, to be financially sustainable, it needs to be efficient and effective with the resources it has, it needs to be innovative and agile, and it needs to be able to respond to the needs of its learners and other stakeholders and provide ‘value for money’.

To be successful, we need to look inwards and outwards, locally and globally. We provide learning environments which enable learners to develop their knowledge, skills and behaviours and have a positive and enduring impact on the organisations they work for and work with – those people will drive success, and Higher Education Institutions are no different in that respect to other organisations.

What are your hopes for graduates of the programme?

We are looking to develop the next generation of managers and leaders who fulfil their potential and have a positive and enduring impact in and across their organisations.

Ultimately, we aim to inspire and enable our learners to become lifelong learners and more capable and effective practitioners who continually learn, develop and improve, and have a positive impact on others they work with, as well as leading improvement initiatives delivering real value in and across their organisations.

The learners will develop a range of knowledge, skills, and behaviours in management and leadership theories and practices as well as key knowledge and skills they will find invaluable in the workplace, like critical thinking, research skills, communication skills, application of knowledge to practice, analysis, evaluation and synthesis of data and research, appreciate and lead on sustainability and diversity in their organisations, as well as to be able to design research to solve organisational problems, making recommendations which will deliver real-value performance improvements. Learners will develop their confidence and ability to be effective critical reflective practitioners as well as be capable of managing their own continuing professional development.

What challenges do you think business education might face in the coming years?

I think more than ever, we need to ensure “we practice what we teach” – Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) operate more like commercial organisations nowadays, in the financial pressures we face and those experienced by our learners, the increased competition across providers, designing and delivering value for money, innovative, accessible, flexible and diverse provision, are not totally new concepts, they have been around for some time, and they will continue to exist in the coming years.

If we are going to continually excel at what we do, it requires us to keep challenging our modus operandi and to keep evolving and adapting our knowledge and practices, ensuring we can be the best we can be and evolving to the needs of our learners, our institutions and external organisations and communities that we work with and aim to have a positive impact on.

For additional insights, trends and perspectives on higher education, visit the conversation here.