What makes a great MBA programme?

The employer skills survey report paints a familiar, depressing, picture.

Skills are crucial: to business productivity, performance, and growth; to enterprise and innovation; to sustainability and the pursuit of net zero; and, for individuals, to earnings growth and social mobility. If we fail to invest in training and skills, we handicap the nation.

Now more than ever, we cannot afford to clip the nation’s wings through a failure to invest in skills. Productivity has flatlined since the financial crisis – growing by c0.5% per year between 2008 and 2020. Growth is anaemic – with the UK only narrowly avoiding a technical recession last year. Earnings growth is stagnant; indeed real wages having fallen in the past two years.

Government and the business community each need to do more. Government needs to provide a sound, stable and adequately funded skills system; nobody could sensibly claim that successive Governments have done that over the last 16 years.

And businesses need to stop complaining about the apprenticeship levy and start investing in the skills that power their profitability; it’s your business, stop expecting Government to invest in it so that you don’t have to…!

MH&A’s new qualification, assessment and curriculum design offer to awarding and professional bodies

HEI guide to degree apprenticeships

Going public - the implications of college reclassification