Olga Dergunova: «Our goal is to provide relevant knowledge for managers at any stage of career»

Why did the Business School need a new strategy? How and where did the existing directions for development come from? What's in store for students, alumni, faculty and partners? Olga Dergunova, Deputy President and Chairman of VTB Bank, Director of GSOM SPbU, spoke about this at a meeting with students during the Management Career Week.

For many years in a row GSOM SPbU has been included in the leading international rankings, the students show high results, and the alumni are in demand at the labor market. Nevertheless, management set the ambitious goal of not only strengthening its position, but also improving it by making GSOM SPbU a leader of business education in Russia.



«In order to not sound abstract, we asked our main stakeholders to answer two questions: how should a number one business school look like and what's missing in GSOM SPbU for that. The obtained results formed the basis for developing a new strategy», — told Olga Dergunova.

A comprehensive approach to development of the business school takes into consideration the interests of all stakeholders, and the structure of the strategy reflects those elements that have an impact on the achievement of results.

Olga Dergunova: «We have determined that our goal is to provide relevant knowledge for managers at any stage of career». 

 

The implemented changes will affect all educational directions: a review of the content plan of bachelor's programmes will be conducted towards the most demanded in the knowledge market and learning formats, new corporate programmes and programmes of additional professional education are being developed. In 2021, master's programmes will be relaunched.


«The line between master's program and Executive Education is disappearing, the only difference is the age of the students. Our goal is to build up a portfolio of quality specialized master's programs. All of this is for students to have the opportunity to come back to master's program even after the end of the current one, for example, to study in a new industrial segment, acquiring profound professional skills in the realm that is new for them. That will allow the business school to form such a lifelong learning approach that is already becoming not future, but present of modern education», — noted Olga Dergunova.

Change of a content plan entails expansion of academic staff of GSOM by involving professors-practitioners and international experts.

According to Olga Dergunova, online has facilitated this process — now, foreign experts do not need to travel somewhere in order to give lectures. 

In devising a development strategy, GSOM uses an agile approach that implies a sequenced implementation of objectives: firstly, hypothesis is tested, then an outcome is achieved, and a new hypothesis is being set. For testing each hypothesis, a particular limited time is set aside: that allows to not get hung up during tasks implementation.  



«From the goal through incremental results we are moving together towards success. Of course, there can be unsuccessful outcomes during the pilot phase and hypothesis testing. But even here it is needed to see the positive side: failure in an experiment is normal, so, we will choose another approach and will not make a mistake in project implementation», — pointed out GSOM SPbU Director.

In addition, GSOM is launching flexible programmes of additional education (at present, courses for Gazprom, VTB Bank and AFK Sistema are already developed) and develops technological environment at campuses.