A Revamped BBA Focuses on the Future

• To flourish in the evolving business world, students will need skills they can gain only in the classroom: critical thinking, teamwork, leadership, resilience, and problem-solving ability.
• Hult revised its BBA curriculum with the input of staff and faculty members who addressed gaps between what employers wanted and what schools currently offered.
• The school’s updated BBA modules focus on knowledge, theory, and skills development, and each one is built around a hands-on business challenge.

 
Change is not easy, especially in educational institutions where varying stakeholder needs and established organizational structures can hinder the ability to make significant adjustments, both to programs and processes. But change is necessary if our business schools are to remain pioneering institutions that prepare students for success in a demanding business environment.

As business schools design programs for the future, we must adapt both what and how we teach tomorrow’s leaders. In the classroom, we must take an innovative holistic approach that provides students with knowledge while building their interpersonal capabilities. And we must ensure our programs remain relevant by staying nimble, monitoring the evolving needs of stakeholders, and maintaining a regular and vigorous feedback loop with students.

At Hult International Business School, part of our commitment to continuous improvement has involved revising our global curriculum, starting with our BBA program. Here, the three of us would like to share the learning process we underwent as we implemented changes across our global campus network.

We Focused on ‘Human’ Skills

By Matt Lilley

Those of us in higher education are facing a strategic challenge. Today, knowledge and content are available to most people instantly and for free—and the emergence of Generative AI analysis has made information even more readily accessible. In such a world, how do we convince students that getting a degree is worth their time and money?

Students are feeling the pressure, as well. How can they plan for long-term success in a complex environment where change is constant, disruptive technology is around every corner, and virtual work has established a new set of rules for how to collaborate with colleagues?

To help learners keep pace with rapid changes in industry, business schools should be purpose-driven, decisive, and agile. We must advance our teaching to meet the needs of employers, focusing on the skills that matter most in today’s business environment. This means that, in addition to imparting subject matter expertise, we need to teach the softer “human skills” that will help young people succeed throughout their careers.

To achieve this goal, we must consider key questions. How can we help students improve their critical thinking skills and develop good business judgment? How can we lead them to build effective communication skills that will allow them to work with people who are different from them? How can we help them develop and strengthen their personal leadership styles? How can we give them opportunities to use their new knowledge to solve real-world problems?

In addition to imparting subject matter expertise, business schools need to teach the softer “human skills” that will help young people succeed throughout their careers.

As we apply these answers to our teaching methods, we provide a unique value offering that students can’t replicate from home by searching Google or crafting a prompt for ChatGPT. Students can gain these competencies only by interacting with their professors and peers in dynamic learning environments.

Today, it’s more important than ever for graduates to know how to think critically and creatively, communicate effectively, work in teams, manage and lead people, be resilient, solve problems, and learn to learn. At Hult, we keep these needs top of mind as we continually innovate our undergraduate curriculum. We believe these updated competencies will genuinely prepare our students to thrive once they graduate from our schools and enter their chosen professional fields.

We Prioritized Teamwork During the Planning Process

By Mona Dhillon

Our goal in revising the Hult BBA was to deliver a rigorous academic business program in a way that more closely mimics the workplace. We wanted to move away from the usual model in which students would take independent courses for four years, to a newer model in which modular, interdisciplinary content would be centered around teamwork and a business challenge.

As part of the process, we had to address specific gaps that existed between the skills that employers seek today and the type of experience that a traditional higher education experience delivers. This led us to design a curriculum that combined knowledge and durable skills.

Any time an institution pursues large-scale organizational change, it must prioritize teamwork and collaboration. As we headed into our curriculum revision, it was imperative that we align our global network of faculty and program administrators across Hult’s four main campuses in London, Boston, Dubai, and San Francisco.

We began by gathering 40 Hult personnel for a two-day workshop in Boston. Participants included faculty across disciplines, career advisors, and system developers, as well as members of our teams dedicated to academic affairs, quality assurance, student services, and campus operations. During the program design process, we prioritized working in groups to ensure that multiple stakeholder voices were part of the discussion.

The members of each group discussed the answer to a single question: What do we want our BBA graduates to be known for? Everyone started with a clean slate. It was a real design thinking exercise in practice.

We had to address specific gaps that existed between the skills that employers seek today and the type of experience that a traditional higher education experience delivers.

At the conclusion of the workshop, the group had created a model based on four key components: developing knowledge and skills, delivering team-based challenge learning, offering personal development coaching, and helping students build portfolios that would track their development and prepare them for their careers.

Staff and faculty at the workshop also focused on outcomes, taking a data-driven approach to researching the top skills that employers are looking for in graduates. With this data in hand, we performed a gap analysis to determine how we should revise our existing curriculum so we could build these skills into a new BBA program. We strategized how we would need to change the teaching model to deliver a truly interdisciplinary learning experience that emulates the real business world.

We also reimagined the learning environment, which has turned out to be quite an impactful innovation. We have completely redesigned our classrooms, installing team tables and multiple screens. In the new setup, students are no longer all facing in one direction as they focus on a single lecturer. Instead, students operate in a more collaborative learning environment where professors can facilitate learning and teamwork.

Our program development process was iterative and went through multiple rounds of feedback from various stakeholders over a two-year period. We continue to exercise this feedback loop as we make ongoing improvements based on suggestions from students, faculty, and staff. It has been an incredible endeavor of intellectual commitment, deep collaboration, entrepreneurial spirit, and successful teamwork.

We Emphasized Skills and Mindsets

By Ronan Gruenbaum

To better prepare our students for the future of work, we must understand that it is not enough for them just to know. They also must know how to do.

At Hult, when we analyzed jobs data to understand market needs, we determined that employers today are looking for core competencies we call “the five C’s.” These include communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creative thinking, and the capacity to learn.

Students who develop that last ability are able to self-evaluate and determine what else they need to know. Since people often learn the most on the job, it’s essential that our graduates can identify areas where they need to improve and take steps toward achieving that progress. While most employers expect to teach new hires the technical aspects of their roles, companies often find it more difficult to teach employees softer skills, as these take far longer to practice and master. Business schools can take on that task.

Employers are looking for five core competencies: communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creative thinking, and the capacity to learn.

As we were redesigning Hult’s BBA, we had the insight that some in-demand skills are not skills at all, but mindsets. We realized that if students developed these specific mindsets and attitudes, they would be better able to develop core skills. For instance, people with growth mindsets accept that they learn through failure and can always improve. Those with global mindsets believe they can learn something new from anyone, from anywhere.

Pedagogical research helped us dig deeper into how people learn. For our revised BBA program, we created modules focused on knowledge, theory, and skills development, each one built around hands-on business challenges. For example, Hult undergraduate students now begin the program by taking Core Module 1: Startup Challenge, in which they must design a new product or service and conduct all necessary work leading up to and including a business plan for potential investors.

Instead of conducting assessment through the traditional model of timed exams, we have prioritized practical and applied learning by combining individual assessments with team assessments drawn from challenge-based learning. This ensures that students have no room to hide behind teammates—they all must step up. When we require students to work in groups to achieve goals, we are mimicking the work environment. Such a format helps students gain important business and humanities knowledge as well as critical teamwork and leadership skills.

We also promote individual development by providing students with personal coaches who can help them track their progress and choose solid career paths.

While we believe our revamped BBA program has been a success, we engage in ongoing continuous improvement based on feedback from all stakeholders. For instance, immediately after the completion of the first module, we gathered information from students in the inaugural class of the revised program. Based on their comments, we adjusted the next two modules, which allowed us to evolve the program in real time.

As an example, we learned that introductory quizzes unexpectedly increased student stress levels due to their high-stakes experiences in high school. As a result, we decided to reduce the number of such quizzes and introduce low-stakes memory retrieval activities through other methods. Under these less stressful conditions, students are better able to learn. We continue to seek student feedback throughout each school year, and we make additional changes as needed.

It is now more than two years since we launched our revised BBA program. We have started to incorporate aspects of this updated model throughout our curriculum. Our goal is to give both undergraduate and graduate students opportunities to learn through doing so they will be prepared to flourish in the rapidly changing world of work.