A New Direction For Executive Education? Academia Under Pressure to Deliver

By John Kerr -- Supply Chain Management Review, 4/1/2008

Previous page: The State of the Classroom

Overall, supply chain leaders have few worries about the suitability or availability of current executive education offerings for sharpening functional skills. “CSCMP does a great job of educating a lot of people about supply chain management,” concurs Welch Foods' Dee Biggs. But there is less certainty about the effectiveness of programs for the most senior supply chain officers.

One big challenge, says P&G's Jake Barr, is that programs offered by the academic institutions tend to be based on only part of the total “end to end” supply chain experience. IBM's Carroll agrees with that. “Academia provides very much a textbook education,” he says. “But it doesn't help you with how to deal in a multicultural business that's global. You need to have more cultural awareness when you're dealing with partners overseas; you're often starting at a baseline of being bilingual.”

For their part, many academics are feeling the pressure to deliver more. “My belief is that the whole landscape of professional development is changing,” says John Langley, professor of supply chain management and director of Georgia Tech's Supply Chain Executive Program.

“Companies are pushing us for a combination of things that can be challenging for us to deliver.

They want to identify and solve real-world supply chain problems. They also want to get a little bit blue-sky. There's a time and a place for that, but to try to do both of those at the same time is difficult.”

Later in this article, we will look at some of the ways in which academic institutions are working to accommodate industry's increasingly specific requirements for executive education. First, though, let's take a look at developments in supply chain certification.

Continue to: Certification Gets Renewed Attention

In this article:

• Introduction
• The State of the Classroom
• Academia Under Pressure to Deliver
• Certification Gets Renewed Attention
• Online Education Finds Its Place
• More Interest in Customized Programs
• Continuing Challenges for Exec Ed

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