UNB Business Program Says Experiential Learning Helps Students Hit The Ground Running With Employers
When it comes to hiring, employers in the region want graduates who can hit the ground running – and that’s what the University of New Brunswick‘s Faculty of Management is doing with its Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) program.
Over the last few years, the faculty has been making moves to become a more experiential business school, something Associate Dean of Strategic Initiatives Martin Wielemaker, says came from the feedback from the business community.
“What a lot of them told us was they would like Management education to be more applied,” says Wielemaker. “It’s an applied discipline in general, but the danger is sometimes we’re too much in an ivory tower. We get stuck in our research and focus on that.”
Employers said they wanted to see graduates have practical skills and be able to translate theory to solving practical real-world problems.
“That was really what the community was telling us and we said, ‘Let’s grab that by the horns and really do it,'” says Wielemaker.
While most universities offer some sort experiential learning courses, they are often not required and typically are offered to upper-year students. That’s something UNB wanted to change.
“We have experiential courses, we always had them, but they tended to be in the upper years or graduate level, and they tended to be electives for a select few,” says Wielemaker. “Instead, we wanted to change the BBA so that it was incorporated throughout the program for all students. That was the big change we made.”
A perfect example of this is the Business Planning and Entrepreneurship course that’s now mandatory for all first-year BBA students. In the course, students work in groups to create and validate a business idea and plan. Students connect with mentors from the business community who share their knowledge throughout the course and give feedback on their projects.
At the end of the term, the teams compete in class to sharpen their pitches with the mentors. The top teams will then be invited to compete at the APEX Business Plan Competition – a large pitch event that is dedicating a new stream to first-year students.
While first-year students take fundamental courses about finance, HR, accounting and marketing, there wasn’t one where they got to put that knowledge into practice. Wielemaker says providing that opportunity through a mandatory course is important.
‘We felt that the students were seeing themselves too much as administrators or implementors. What New Brunswick really needed was value creators. People who can come up with new stuff,” he says.
“If you start in your first year as just seeing yourself as an administrator, you’ve started on the wrong foot right away. We wanted to start on the right foot. We want the students to see themselves as innovators. They have to bring something new and that’s what entrepreneurship really offers.”
Second-year student Kelsey Embleton took the course last year. She and her teammates developed a business plan for their company Green Cube, which would offer plant-based packaging.
She says the course ensured first-year students connected and learned how to work together.
“It really forced you to interact with new people,” she says. “Some of the people in my group are my best friends now. You have to step outside the box and become comfortable with new things.”
Embleton took away other important skills from the course, including how to give an effective presentation, pitch an idea, and learning to speak with other professionals.
“It was definitely a new experience,” she says. “Our professor and the mentors we had were helpful, but you figure it out, you learn by actually doing the things.”
After their first year, students are then able to take other experiential courses based on what they choose to specialize in. Other course options include the Venture Assessment course, the Student Investment Fund, Project Management and the Venture Analyst Leadership program.
Though some could argue that students should have more foundational courses under their belt before they take an experiential course, Wielemaker disagrees. He says experiential learning helps first-year students put all the things they learn in lecture-based courses into context.
“In their first year, it’s so far removed from applying knowledge that if you only have textbook courses, it is difficult for students to see the relevance. But when you take an entrepreneurship course like this one, you understand why you need HR, why you need accounting,” he says.
“It starts to make sense and you become interested in that course. That’s what we think the entrepreneurship course will do. It doesn’t matter if you have all the knowledge yet. This way you’ll understand why you need that knowledge.”
As is the case with universities across the country, things are looking a little different for BBA students this year. But it turns out courses like Business Planning and Entrepreneurship translate well into the virtual space. Students still meet and socialize during class times, and mentors, including some new ones outside the region, are joining the discussions virtually too.
Looking ahead to the future, Wielemaker says they will continue to add more experiential learning to the faculty’s graduate programs.
“We really focused on revamping our undergrad program. Now we’re working on our graduate programs, that’s where the thrust will be,” he says. “One key aspect is analytics, so we intend to launch an analytics program in the future. The whole business world is digitizing and analytics is a really important skill for students to have.”
This story is sponsored by the University of New Brunswick.