Harvard Business School offers “Business Prep” to Undergraduates
“HBS lite” for undergrad workforce entry – Harvard Business School helps college grads “hit the ground running.”
Harvard Business School begins its foray into online education and adds an earlier brand imprint upon undergraduates with a new program designed to teach “business readiness.”
This three-course primer on business fundamentals is aimed at undergraduate students enrolled at other institutions. Such a course could potentially fill in the gaps for liberal arts majors and others that need more commerical skills in today’s dynamic job market. The foundational classes are in financial accounting, business analytics, and economics for managers.
The importance of this news goes beyond Harvard’s new push into online education, as it:
- highlights what market expectations and gaps exist for new job entrants,
- and reinforces the market’s need for analytical thinking, specifically – around formulating quantitatively based, insights, and communicating ideas succinctly and creatively.
This announcement makes one wonder why universities are not filling in this gap themselves and why students need to be enrolled at “dual universities.” In effect all universities and colleges should be conducting their own “gap analysis.” Meaning that they should be dynamically imparting a strategic, zero-based approach to evaluating how relevant, differentiating, and sustainable their curriculums are to the future students that they intend to serve. For most any field in today’s new creative and knowledge-intensive world – new analytic and technology based skills are needed to enter and compete successfully. Please feel share similar stories on who is “reinventing,” their university, curriculum, and student “readiness,” for today’s and tomorrow’s dynamic environment.
