Customised courses mark new direction
Campus moves its resources away from open enrolment towards tailor-made programmes, writes Michael Taylor

Customization is the way of the future in executive education, judging by changes taking place at the Richard Ivey School of Business, which established a campus in Hong Kong in 1998.
Owing to the increasing number of Asian clients seeking customized programmes, it has been switching its executive education resources away from open enrolment programmes to customize and consortium programmes.
“Focusing on customized programmes allows us to develop deep and long-term relationships with our clients,” said Jorge Choy, director, executive programmes-Asia, the Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario, Canada.
“This is because in the process of designing custom programmes we work very closely with clients and get to know their organization very well. The better we know our clients the more they come back to us for their management development needs.”
Targeted at organizations with 20 or more executives sharing similar management development needs, custom programmes are tailored to the specific needs of a corporation or body.
“We design these programmes in close partnership with our clients,” Mr Choy said. “Programme content is the result of intensive development to set clear and measurable objectives and match course content and learning techniques to a company’s needs. Topics typically include such issues as leadership, strategy, change management, marketing and finance.”
A consortium programme is an intensive one attended by executives from six to eight companies sharing similar development needs. Each one sends five to eight participants. “Participating organizations influence the content of the programmes,” My Choy said. “Thus, consortium programmes combine the features of both custom programmes and open enrolment programmes, but the real value comes from the consortium members learning from each other through team and class sessions, sharing best practices and gaining insights into how the consortium partners tackle issues in different ways.”
Consortium programmes have proven very popular in Hong Kong. They strengthen the leadership and strategic management skills of executives and provide networking opportunities within different types of organizations.
“A lot of companies would like their executives to be exposed to how executives in other industries deal with the same issues,” Mr Choy said. “Many of our clients send certain groups of executives to custom programmes and other groups to consortium programmes.”
Executives need to return to the classroom for many reasons.
“A lot of people start in a functional role,” My Choy said. “At some point they need to look at things from a more company-wide- or cross-enterprise- perspective instead of from the perspective of someone in sales, marketing or accounting.”
Ivey has been ranked as Greater China’s No 1 provider of executive education for three years running. One of its selling points is its commitment to the case study method, developed and popularized at Harvard.
Under this system students begin by working through what business schools call a case- a real- world problem that happened within a genuine corporate setting- on an individual basis. They develop recommendations based in their understanding of the case and discuss the case in more detail within their group. They finally meet with the rest of the class and – under the guidance of the professor- take part in an in-depth discussion of the case and all of its implications.
Kathleen Slaughter, executive director and associate dean, Ivey Asia, said it was important that students had all of the information- including misinformation- that real –world decision – makers would have.
It is this practical focus that adds value to an executive education programme.

April 22, 2006
South China Morning Post