We deliver our services in accordance with the international best practices in business education and in compliance with relevant accreditation standards for business schools.
Accreditation Readiness Assessment
Leading a business school through accreditation is a time- and resource-consuming process. It is not a good idea to initiate this process without getting a reliable assessment of the current state the school is in, identifying gaps in relation to relevant accreditation standards, and estimating what it would take to close all the gaps and meet the accreditation requirements. We offer several consulting services designed to assess a business school’s readiness for accreditation at various points in the accreditation process.
Strategic Planning
In today’s increasingly competitive market for business education, having a sound long-term strategy is essential for the survival and success of any educational institution. A solid Strategic Plan that clearly communicates a unique mission, vision, goals, and objectives to all the relevant stakeholders is also an important requirement of all main accreditation agencies for business schools. With our deep understanding of Strategy and the Strategic Planning Process in the educational context, we will be able to effectively facilitate strategic planning within your college or individual academic units. There are several benefits in letting us facilitate the strategic planning process for you. By delegating strategic planning facilitation to us, you will free up your resources for other pressing initiatives. Also, by using an independent third party that is not constrained by the formal organization hierarchy, informal political alliance, or the prevailing way of thinking, you are more likely to ensure greater stakeholder involvement in the strategic planning process via an uninhibited flow of information from the ground up.
Assurance of Learning
Assurance of Learning (AoL) or assessment is an essential element of all major accreditation standards for business school. It is also one of the “pain points” for many schools. An effective Assurance of Learning system requires specialized knowledge, strong leadership, and commitment of substantial resources – something that many business schools are lacking due to resource constraints. Assurance of Learning is one of our strengths. We will be happy to help you create a culture of assessment within your college and engage all the relevant stakeholders in data-driven decision making for the purpose of improving the curriculum. With our simple yet robust templates, blueprints, and technology solutions, you will be able to set up an effective Assurance of Learning system, improve the quality of the curriculum by “closing the loop,” and meet relevant accreditation requirements.
Accreditation Report Editing
Accreditation reports are an essential part of the accreditation process; they serve as the main communication channel between a business school and its accreditation agency. A clear, well-written report is essential for making a positive impression on the reviewers. On the opposite end, a poorly written report can give the reviewers a misleading impression of poor quality not just in relation to the report but also to the entire business school. We are in a good position to edit your report due to our understanding of accreditation standards and various matters related to the operations of a business school. Our accreditation report editing services can help your business school to clearly communicate and highlight all the hard work you have put into increasing educational quality and meeting accreditation standards.
Accreditation Management
The accreditation clock does not stop while your college is going through a transition in leadership or through the process of recruiting new team members with essential roles in the accreditation process. By outsourcing accreditation management to us (either temporarily or on an ongoing basis), you will save time and money. Hiring us as a subcontractor is cheaper than hiring a full-time employee to oversee Assurance of Learning for the entire accreditation effort. Most importantly, your accreditation effort will not lose its “steam,” and you will be more likely to meet the deadlines in relation to the accreditation process.
Assistance with International Recruitment of Academic Leaders
We provided highly targeted and customizable recruitment services for business schools seeking to fill their senior leadership roles. Unlike typical corporate recruitment companies, we have a very good understanding of the market for senior academic administrators. From our own experience, we know what it takes to find a suitable Dean, Associate Dean, Assistant Dean, Accreditation Director, Assessment Director, etc. for an academic unit. We will leverage our own professional network to find a handful of suitable candidates who are both able and willing to assume a role within your college, sparing you from wasting valuable time and losing credibility when a corporate recruiter approaches the wrong type of people on your behalf.
Facilitating International Partnerships
Due to the increasing globalization of business education, international partnerships are essential for both the global and local competitiveness and success of a business school. Finding the right international partner in business education is quite challenging: business schools in different countries operate under different legal and accreditation requirements, operational practices, and cultural norms. Even if a suitable international partner is found, most international partnerships fail to produce tangible results due to the lack of attention and resources devoted to these partnerships. A successful international partnership requires assigning a person or a group of people to lead the partnership, manage its day-to-day operations, and find numerous workarounds required to make the partnership work. To make sure that your international partnership is a success, we will leverage our own global network of business schools to find a suitable international partner for your college, work out the details of the partnership arrangement, and provide daily management of the partnership so that you do not have to allocate your own scarce resources to this partnership.
Curriculum Development
Are you thinking about starting a new undergraduate or graduate business program but don’t have the necessary faculty resources to get the idea off the ground? We will work with academics, industry experts, and professional certification bodies to develop a world-class curriculum that takes into account the particularities of your academic unit. The curriculum will be fully aligned with the requirements of relevant certification bodies and will make it easy to implement an effective assurance of learning system for the newly developed program.
Research
Whether it is an alumni survey designed to assess student satisfaction with the quality of education and alumni employability or a market research project for benchmarking your business programs against competition—we have an experienced team of researchers and data analysts who can gather this data for you and organize it in a simple, actionable manner. We have developed a number of proprietary electronic tools for conducting alumni surveys, scraping data from social media, and benchmarking programs against the market. We will leverage these tools to get the data and information that you need as quickly as possible.
Templates
Various templates and blueprints for carrying out important aspects of the accreditation process.