The end of the MBA?
Why the future of work is all-change when it comes to education
Well, hallo. Sorry for the delay for those of you already subscribed and hallo to my new Substack friends. Back in September I joined Bloomberg’s new section dedicated to work, Work Shift, with a new column called Working Assumptions. That appears every fortnight as well as a jolly good weekly newsletter. So if you are impatient for news and views on work: head there.
My new column will be out this week (do subscribe to Bloomberg, their Work Shift vertical is a goldmine of daily information on work and the future of work) and is a Davos Diary of what I got up to at this year’s World Economic Forum, but I wanted to share with you exclusively one startling conversation I had changing my perceptions about the future of higher education and work.
Not to put too fine a point on it: I think the MBA as we know it might be over.
What?! The qualification which is responsible for up to a quarter of the world’s CEO’s top qualification (60% of US ones?).
Three things make me think this, other than the obvious which is the many MBA programmes have not yet updated post-pandemic and their curriculums stop at the Gig Economy: In other words Quiet Quitting, The Great Resignation and Career Cushioning have not yet made it on to the syllabus, let along Hybrid Working and all that entails.
The three reasons are this:
Firstly, I was given an interview for my podcast The Nowhere Office with His Excellency Ahmad Belhoul Al Falsi, Minister of Education of the United Arab Emirates who startled me by saying that since 2016 UAE has stopped funding MBA students and sending the abroad at the state’s expense because, in essence, the only value was for the networks. Listen to the interview here.
Secondly, new Qualifications are needed for new times. At Davos I was invited to a lunch with Daphne Kis, CEO of WorldQuant University which provides specialist degrees aimed at the hyper-evolving financial market digital economy. And here’s the kicker: It’s free and comes with work placements.
And thirdly, I listened closely to what US Labor Secretary Marty Walsh was saying in sessions at WEF and he was uncompromising: apprenticeships are going to be as important as college degrees as we need new skills and new times - and new equality of access - to the job market.
Does this mean that the MBA is finished? No. And in fact I’m studying some MBA courses myself online at brilliant Heriot Watt university because the historical context of much of today’s management and leadership disciplines can only be understood with this kind of course.
And yet. And but. Will the MBA exist in its current format in five years, or ten? I have to say I doubt it. Even the name seems a little out of sync with the times doesn’t it?
The world of work - from AI (and specifically Chat GPT in terms of white collar workers in an imminent sense), the changing global demographics of work and the workplace and the impact of post pandemic hybrid working norms all mean that the present rulebook needs to be completely rewritten.
Or should I say road map?
Thank you for reading.
