Survey Findings: Onboarding Practices
Are employers providing onboarding programs and practices to their new hires? More than 80% of organizations reported that they have either formal (i.e., written, documented, standard) or informal onboarding programs and/or practices. The vast majority of organizations indicated that providing communication, training and resources is extremely important for the successful adjustment of new hires. SHRM conducted a survey about organizations’ onboarding programs and practices, timing and duration of onboarding programs and organizational barriers to offering formal onboarding activities
Time to innovate: the future of traditional business schools
Indeed it was just six months ago that Varadan, 30, and Vandaele, 32, first worked together, during a course designed to identify companies ripe for a buy-out. Now they have constructed a business plan, raised private equity capital and put their lessons into practice. “The real test of the MBA is when you go back to the real world to test your learning,” says Vandaele, a former banker and consultant.
Although the numbers are still small, a growing percentage of MBA graduates are opting to become entrepreneurs. At MIT Sloan, 8.4 per cent of MBA students who graduated in 2010 started their own companies on graduation, one of the highest proportions to date. At Harvard Business School, between 35 and 45 students followed the same path.
The move is a direct reaction to the recession, says Jana Kierstead, managing director of MBA career and professional development at Harvard. “These people have seen a lot. They have seen their parents laid off; they have seen their friends laid off. They were profoundly affected by seeing their colleagues pack their boxes and leave.”
Traditional, campus-based MBA programmes in the US and Europe are facing more competition than ever owing to accelerating growth in the number of schools in developing countries and an explosion in online learning. How will the world’s top business schools, especially those in the US, become global players? And how will they build scale while retaining quality?
Paul Danos, long-term dean of the Tuck School of Business at Ivy League Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, describes traditional business schools as a “throwback” model. “Nobody has a big market share. We’re all big fish in our small ponds,” he says.
Elite business schools have also been slow to innovate, says Karl Ulrich, vice-dean for innovation at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “The lead institutions have been the last to innovate. The second- and third-tier institutions have been doing really interesting things, because they have had to.”
Leading the way among the top schools has been the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, which will launch a distance-learning MBA this year that adheres to all the entrance and content criteria used for its other MBA programmes – including a requirement for applicants to take the Graduate Management Admission Test. James Dean, the school’s dean, says he is in no doubt that others will follow.
While some schools concentrate on the need for size and scale, others are tackling the suite of programmes they offer. Santiago Iñiguez, dean of IE Business School in Madrid, refers to the “hybridisation” of the market. “After years of commoditisation when an MBA meant the same thing, we will now see an explosion of differentiation,” he says.
For example, MBAs are increasingly offered as joint or double degrees with other subject areas or business schools. There is also growing interest in masters and other types of degrees.
David Schmittlein, dean of MIT Sloan, is one US business school boss who has always valued degree plurality. “If management education is really valuable, how much of it should be for 28-year-olds who have worked for five or six years? I don’t have anything against the MBA programme; it just isn’t the be-all and end-all.”
Moreover, the traditional divide between one-year MBAs in Europe and two-year degrees in the US, though never clear-cut, could blur even further, with traditional US schools such as Kellogg School of Management, just outside Chicago, building up their accelerated one-year degrees.
Eric Weber, associate dean of Iese Business School in Spain, which offers one of Europe’s few two-year MBAs, says one drawback to a one-year degree is that it usually does not include a summer internship. “The obstacle to [one-year programmes] is that recruiters use internships to ‘test-drive’ students,” he says.
Many disagree. Carol Stephenson is dean of the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario, which reduced the length of its MBA from two years to one. In 2010, 92 per cent of the class had jobs three months after graduation. “There is the idea that you need an internship,” she says. “That turned out to be a myth.”
Jake Cohen, dean of the MBA programme at Insead – arguably the best-known one-year programme in the world, enrolling 1,000 students a year – says the one-year time frame with study on two campuses has become the school’s value proposition. “This is the big reason they apply to Insead,” he says.
Though many business schools are poised for change, conservative forces may yet mean they become complacent, reverting to the pre-recessionary model. For although some students have eschewed the traditional MBA job route, most have not.
Graduates are considering a wider range of jobs than a decade ago, but recruiters are looking for very much the same skills as before the recession, says Susan Kline, director of MBA career development at MIT Sloan. “I have no sense that corporations are asking for something different from our students,” she says.
With the recession ending and recruitment opportunities up overall – the schools at the top of this year’s Financial Times MBA ranking report increases in students employed of roughly 10 percentage points – business schools would usually expect to see a decrease in applications as managers seek job opportunities with their existing employers.
But over the past year, there have been few signs that applications have fallen. That could change. J.J. Cutler, deputy vice-dean of MBA admissions, financial aid and career services at Wharton, predicts applications at the school will be down slightly over the next cycle as a result of the growth in opportunities in emerging markets such as India and China.
The more things change, it seems, the more they stay the same.
As the recently appointed leader of your business school, what was your New Year’s resolution?
Sally Blount
Dean, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, US
“To initiate discussions among faculty, students and alumni that explore what it takes to educate wise, collaboratively minded leaders – leaders who will build strong organisations and transform markets for the betterment of society.”
Dominique Turpin
President, IMD, Switzerland
“In one word – innovate. As IMD president for my first full year, I want to commit myself to working with my colleagues on regularly updating our programmes, and the way we deliver them, to best serve our learning partners. We must remain at the forefront of innovation in executive education.”
Nitin Nohria
Dean, Harvard Business School, US
“In 2011, I resolve to seize the moment by mobilising our faculty to drive innovation at Harvard in ways that equip our students to be leaders with the competence and character to address emerging global business and social challenges.”
Mark Taylor
Dean, Warwick Business School, UK
“My resolution for 2011 is for Warwick Business School to put critical and creative thinking at the heart of everything we do. I firmly believe this is the best way to align excellence in research and teaching and to provide a strong return on investment for our alumni over their entire career.”
Here Comes The Education Revolution
There’s something happening in the education sector. We’re about to redefine what it means to be ‘educated’. There’s a number of signs that change is coming.
- The public reaction to ‘Waiting for Superman’ reminds me of the reaction to ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. It’s the kind of movie that evokes a ‘let’s storm the gates’ response in nearly everyone who sees it.
- Mark Zuckerberg’s donation of $100MM to the Newark school system. I think the increasing focus on education reform will result in more philanthropic funds being diverted to this issue. Donation’s like Zuckerberg’s will only speed this process.
- Rupert Murdoch’s entry into ‘the education marketplace’, highlighted by his hiring of former New York city schools chancellor Joel Klein. If Murdoch makes substantial investments in this space, I expect others will follow.
- The looming student loans crisis. Mike Karnjanaprakorn wrote about the looming student loans crisis in his article College Inc. Americans now owe more on their student loans ($830B) than their credit cards ($827B) and default rates for federally guaranteed student loans are rising.
- The increasing questioning of the notion that a college degree equals success. Mike examined this in his post College is Overrated**. Today, 17MM Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that require less skill than those associated with a bachelor’s degree (like being a waiter, parking lot attendant, or janitor).
- The gap between people’s educational credentials and actual competence. Most significantly, this is playing out in the US where there’s evidence to show that the slow economic recovery is due in part to skills shortages resulting from the manufacturing workforce being ill-equipped to take up roles in the new digital economy.
My views on the value of education are coloured by my own experiences. While at University, when people would ask why I was studying Law, my standard response was that it was the best use of my time while I figured out what I really wanted to do.
On this point I was wrong and as a result, I spent the best of my learning years (19-24) as a below-average Law student, ignoring my passions and natural aptitudes on the basis that smart people did Law and therefore so should I.
In time, I have become a strong believer in the Steve Jobs school of thought – follow your passion, don’t settle and remember that every day may be your last (so don’t spend too long doing things you don’t enjoy).
The Horizon Report: 2010 Australia-New Zealand
The Horizon Report: 2010 Australia-New Zealand Edition is the third in the series to focus on the impact of emerging technologies on post-secondary education in Australia and New Zealand.
How Email and Social Media Changed Our Lives
A new survey released today, The New New Inbox--How Email and Social Media Changed Our Lives, by Pierre Khawand, founder and CEO of People-OnTheGo reveals that the overwhelming majority of workers today are struggling to keep up with an overload of email while grappling with the enormous challenge of monitoring and using Social Media. The use of Social Media is largely for personal reasons. Businesses have not yet harnessed the use of Social Media and employees are still using rudimentary tools.
San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) November 11, 2010
A new survey report released today, The New New Inbox--How Email and Social Media Changed Our Lives, by Pierre Khawand, founder and CEO of People-OnTheGo reveals that the overwhelming majority of workers today are struggling to keep up with an overload of email while grappling with the enormous challenge of monitoring and using Social Media. The use of Social Media is largely for personal reasons. Businesses have not yet harnessed the use of Social Media and employees are still using rudimentary tools.
According to the survey of more than 1000 business professionals, workers are spending more than half of their working day (4.45 hours) on corporate and personal email while also monitoring a wide range of Social Media. The majority of respondents (67.6%) said they monitor multiple inboxes on a daily basis. Email and social media also take up a huge amount of time -- 65.8% of participants reported interrupting their work constantly or too often just to check their inboxes.
However, only 18.2% responded that they have a clear strategy for dealing with their inboxes while the remaining 81.8% have little or no strategy for dealing with email or social media monitoring.
"These forces bring incredible challenges...but also tremendous opportunities," says Khawand. "With all the excitement about these channels of communication we are now suffering from serious challenges that are leaving our workforce scattered and dis-oriented, and shrinking the bottom line. However, the next generation of professionals and managers will redefine the tools, channels, platforms that we use to communicate."
As Khawand explains, inboxes were once solely used for internal corporate email. With the advent of the Internet, the "New" inbox connected workers externally beyond their offices and made email the dominant communication tool. Today, the "New" New Inbox includes e-mail and social media feeds together. This inbox brings exciting new opportunities and some rather unique challenges as well.
Some of the key findings revealed by The New New Inbox Survey include:
Email Outweighs Social Media by 3 to 1 -- Business professionals spend an average of 3.27 hours per day on e-mail and 1.18 hours on social media. Personal and corporate email dominate, followed by Facebook and LinkedIn. Twitter has not gained as much traction among those surveyed, except for Generation Y users who use Twitter more so than others.
Social Media is on the Rise but is Widely Misused -- The majority of the survey participants (71.8%) use social media for both work and personal reasons. Social media seems to have significantly reduced the divide between what is work and what is personal, and enabled, or even encouraged, personal and business networks to merge during and after work hours. Use of social media in the workplace is developing rapidly with 58.5% of the survey participants checking Facebook regularly, 47.9% checking LinkedIn regularly, 22.6% checking Twitter, and 21.9% reading blogs. Younger generations lead the pack in their use of social media with Gen Y spending an average of 1.8 hours per day on it, compared to 1.21 hours for Gen X, 1 hour for Baby Boomers, and 0.59 hour for Seniors.
There are High Costs and Risks for HR and IT but also Opportunities -- The majority of participants (67.6%) monitor multiple inboxes. 40.6% of the participants believe that they could use significant improvement while 59.4% believe that they are managing and leveraging these inboxes reasonably well. There are tremendous consequences to this development on all fronts. For HR and IT departments, these platforms bring a myriad of risks that need to be managed while at the same time they bring unprecedented opportunities for reaching the workforce, educating and influencing their behavior. Pamela Evans, Director of Executive Programs at NetApp, suggested that companies need to "conduct training on the various communication platforms and educate the workplace on how to leverage those platforms effectively--both social media and email which can increase and expand communications pathways within a company."
The New New Inbox survey also includes information on what can be done to make better use of email and social media going forward including putting in place clear guidelines and educational programs relating to the use of e-mail and social media in the workplace, Declaring social media as an important initiative and formalizing the social media effort and seeking improved tools and technologies that can help streamline inboxes.
More than 1000 business professionals participated in the survey. The largest segment (49.7% of the participants) from organizations with 1000 or more employees, followed by participants from organizations with less than 1000 employees (28% of the participants), and then independent consultants and contractors (22.3% of the participants). The participants represented a broad range of industries. In terms of their functional areas within the organization, professional services, administrative, and marketing were the largest segments, followed by top management, product development, and sales. In terms of the generations, Gen X and Baby Boomers were the largest segments.
