An Idea with Growing Support

A few posts ago (“Creating Something from Nothing” post), I discussed a set of requests from students (not part of the Business School) to learn how to build an organization, with a plan for capital, space, and personnel. Later I talked with a set of parents who wanted their students to learn basic conversational and written protocols of the non-academic sector organization. Dean Treanor of the Law Center has talked about how the lawyers are increasingly working in large organizations where financial planning, balance sheets, and profit and loss statements, forecasting, are part of their work. The Board of Regents think our graduates need skills useful in job interviews in the private sector, for example, reacting to common difficult questions that are asked of applicants to test their mettle. Many think our graduates would be better prepared for their lives with some additional polish.

If we do a good job, our undergraduates with a liberal education under their belts should possess the critical thinking skills that many employers are seeking for their long-term employees, but they would profit from some practical skills that make them valuable in an office on day one of their employment. Our Master’s and PhD students are increasingly entering businesses and large organizations that require practical work skills in addition to deep domain knowledge.

In a discussion with the school deans on the main campus, they too saw the need for such training. The more we discussed this, the more it seems that a set of mini-courses was one possibility, filled with practical information transmission, and features that exercised the learned material in a realistic setting. Some thought that alumni with strong presentational skills might be possible teachers and that professors of the practice now on campus would be good instructors. Some even thought that students themselves could be effective instructors for some material.

Many of the courses don’t fit inside our existing schools, although some of our schools are teaching much deeper, more theoretical courses in the same knowledge domain. So it seems that a new series of courses, maybe called University courses, might fit the bill. They would be bridge-building courses from the academy to the outside world. Some might carry one academic credit, with commensurate amount of work. Some might even carry no credit. They might be open to young alumni as well as current undergraduate and graduate students.

Topics for these courses that have been forwarded so far include:

1. Financial literacy, reading balance sheets, profit/loss statements, alternative budget types
2. The anatomy of a proposal with a business plan
3. An introduction to entrepreneurship
4. Job interviewing 101; alternative resume formats; networking and jobs
5. Quantitative literacy, reading basic statistics, asking the right questions
6. Business communication; the memo, the white paper, the presentation
7. Discerning organizational cultures and how to navigate them
8. Team building, working with teams
9. Oral presentation practicum (the pitch, the autobiography, the debate, the speech, the report)
10. Georgetown history / DC history
11. Jesuit history and mission
12. Data visualization
13. Building a web site
14. Business writing genres (memo, speech, report)
15. Protocol (how to greet, introduce, discern relative status in hierarchies)
16. Succeeding in an organization: discerning culture and power; creating internal and external coalitions
17. Developing negotiating skills

What do you think?