Tag Archive for: education

DCU Business School is expanding its Global Business USA degree, by adding the option to study in the University of San Diego.

The highly popular course, which attracts the brightest Leaving Certificate students, allows participants to complete half of their courses at DCU and the other half at the partner university. Students graduate with a business degree from DCU and another from the partner institution. This is the only degree of its kind in Ireland.

From 2017, there will be a common entry to Global Business USA (DC116), after which students will indicate a preference to study at Northeastern University in Boston or the University of San Diego, located on the west coast of the USA.

DCU Business School is a proud member of the International Partnership of Business Schools (IPBS), a consortium of 12 leading business schools in Europe, the United States and Latin America. DCU currently offers dual degree programmes in Ontario (Canada), Madrid (Spain), Reims (France), and Reutlingen (Germany). A signature component of programmes is that students have the opportunity to complete an internship in each country. This provides an opportunity for students to apply their business knowledge in real companies while gaining valuable international cultural experience.

“We are excited about extending our footprint to the west coast of the United States and building a strong partnership with USD,” says Professor Anne Sinnott, Executive Dean of DCU Business School.

“Both our business schools are committed to developing socially responsible leaders with a global mindset through academically rigorous, relevant education. Like DCU, the degree programmes at USD’s School of Business have achieved the highest level of international recognition by being fully accredited by AACSB International so San Diego was a natural fit for us.”

“USD’s business students are both extremely entrepreneurial and focused on acquiring international business skills that will uniquely differentiate them in the 21st century marketplace,” says Jaime Alonso Gómez, Dean of the USD School of Business.

“Our new dual degree program will provide unprecedented opportunities to do this. We’re excited to offer such value-added experiences for our students.”

A bunch of DCU Business School students took part of the Creative Minds Hackathon in association with the US Embassy and DCU Ryan Academy over the weekend, with some securing the winning ideas.

Three MINT students, Orla Ainsworth (MINT1), Jack Brophy (MINT1) and Ellen Harkin (MINT2) and Olaide Oladimeji (INTB1) were on one of the winning teams ‘Líonra (@LionraHq), a peer-to-peer platform that facilities refugee integration through skills exchange and knowledge sharing’. The aim of project is for newly located refugees to develop a network and create friends in their area through social events during an 8-week programme. Such events would be tailored to the refugees’ interests and would always include locals in the area to ensure that a network of friends is being developed. This also ensures the refugees work on developing their English.

Daniel Kyne from the group ‘Future Roots’ and Oisin Beaudelot from ‘RefReach’ both MINT1 students also took part.

This is only the start of their projects. Congratulations to all our students and wish them luck as they progress their ideas further!

Picture the scene.  You’re sitting opposite your boss in the end- of-year performance review meeting.  It’s been a big year for you; you’ve worked really hard and you and your team have delivered great results, in some areas even exceeding targets despite a very difficult business climate.  Your boss looks up and smiles.  “You’ve done a great job this year Brian” she says “I am going to put you down as a 4”.  “A 4!” you cry indignantly “why not a 5? .  “Now you know that nobody really gets a five here…..”.   After further pointless argument you leave the room, determined to reduce the time and effort you put in next year.

The experience described above is not atypical; for many years an end of year appraisal — in which a numeric rating or descriptive equivalent on a scale is communicated from managers to their direct reports — has been the key event in the annual performance management calendar.  The ratings were perceived as a requirement for demonstrable compliance with employment legislation, especially if a problem arose with a particular employee.  Ratings were also perceived as providing “objective” inputs on which important remuneration and promotion decisions could be based and defended.

Once ratings were accepted as necessary, a substantial consulting industry arose to help organisations design and implement their own performance rating process.  Reports advised the adoption or change from five point scales to four and back again, and from numeric scales to descriptive equivalents – e.g., a 3 becomes “meets expectations”, a  4 “exceeds expectations” etc.   Significant resources were allocated to training and retraining managers to implement these processes.   While all of this was happening, academic research focused largely on studies of what rating systems and processes worked best, while too few studies looked at the bigger question of whether ratings should be used at all.

2015 has seen some really important changes in attitudes to performance ratings, in what may become an irresistible trend.  Most recently, HBR reports that “The move away from conventional, ratings-based performance management continues to gain momentum.  By November 2015, at least 52 large companies had shifted from the practice of once-yearly performance appraisals; estimates are that hundreds of other companies are considering following suit. A wide range of industries are represented.”

Ironically, the catalysts for this rethink have been Deloitte and Accenture, two consulting firms who would have been to the fore in the provision of advice on implementing ratings in the past.   Accenture have completely abandoned annual performance reviews for their 330,000 employees with immediate effect, confirming that “We’re going to get rid of probably 90 percent of what we did in the past”.   Deloitte announced in a HBR article in April 2015 that “we realize that our current process for evaluating the work of our people—and then training them, promoting them, and paying them accordingly—is increasingly out of step with our objectives”.  Both firms say they are adopting new processes that will involve more frequent feedback –“nimbler, real-time, and more individualized—something squarely focused on fueling performance in the future rather than assessing it in the past.”

There seems little doubt that few will shed a tear if the types of meetings described in the introduction become a thing of the past.  As researchers, we can’t but be excited about finding ways to make the performance management process more relevant to today’s business needs.  Of course, there is always a danger that those who embrace these trends without due consideration may be in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.  It’s worth remembering  that there is substantial research evidence to support retaining key aspects of the performance management process such as goal setting, where research clearly shows that employees who are working to achieve specific, challenging but achievable goals will be on average 16% more productive than others doing the same work, in the same conditions but without such goals.

Watch this space.

Dr John McMackin is a lecturer in our Human Resource Management and Organisational Psychology group in DCU Business School. He holds an MBA from Columbia University, New York and a PhD from the University of Oregon. His area of research is around change management, leadership development and strategic innovation.

For more details about the DCU Executive MBA, currently accepting applications, please visit the DCU Executive MBA course page.

As the business world continues to recover from the ravages of the recent recession, many experts now warn that we are far from returning to a business-as-usual scenario. Whether it is Rita Gunther McGrath of Columbia Business School telling us that we have entered a new “transient advantage” era, Joseph Badaracco of Harvard calling it a new “Schumpeterian” recombinant economy or Scott Anthony of Innosight (Clayton Christensen’s consultancy arm) terming it the “great disruption,” few expect the old assumptions and formulas that brought success in the past to continue to be effective in the coming decades.

Richard Dobbs, James Manyika and Jonathan Woetzel of McKinsey have just published a new book called No Ordinary Disruption (New York: Public Affairs, 2015) in which they have identified “the four global forces breaking all the trends.” The four are (1) the shifting locus of economic activity and dynamism to emerging markets like China and India, and, more particularly, to about 400-500 cities within those markets, in what they call a “new age of urbanization”; (2) the acceleration in the scope, scale, and economic impact of technology, where the effects of ongoing, rapid advances in processing power and connectivity are being amplified by the big data revolution, the mobile Internet and the “proliferation of new technology-enabled business models;” (3) global demographics and the aging of the human population, where more than 60% of the world’s people already live in countries with fertility rates that have fallen below replacement rates; and (4) ever-increasing global economic interconnectedness and the  expansion in the flows of capital, people and information associated with it, where “south-south” flows between emerging markets have doubled their share of global trade over the last ten years. Taken together, these four shifts are producing “monumental change.”

To take just three examples of how rapidly and radically the world as we have known it up to recently is being transformed, in December 2014 “Cyber Monday” generated $2.65B in online shopping, but just a few weeks earlier on November 11th, China’s “Singles Day,” Alibaba recorded the world’s highest ever single day e-commerce trading total of $9.3B; earlier, in February 2014, Facebook acquired a 5-year old start-up for an amazing $19.3B, and in September 2014, the Indian Space Research Organization successfully put a spacecraft into orbit around Mars, and for a total cost of only $74M, less than it took to produce the award-winning film, Gravity.

The big implication from No Ordinary Disruption is that all CEOs and corporate strategists will have to learn to “reset” the intuitions that up to now have been guiding their perceptions about future opportunities and challenges. “We have to rethink the assumptions that drive our decisions on such crucial issues as consumption, resources, labour, capital and competition.” According to the McKinsey authors, the era we have already entered is full of promise, but also more volatile and “deeply unsettling,” and for business leaders, the intellectual integrity to be willing and able to see the world as it really is, and the humility and persistence to keep learning, have never been more needed. The recent past is no longer a reliable guide to even the next 5 to 10 years, and imagination, not just experience, is now at a premium.

Professor Brian Leavy is a Professor of Strategic Management at DCU Business School and teaches strategy on the Executive MBA programme. Prior to his academic career, he spent eight years as a manufacturing engineer with Digital Equipment Corporation, now part of Hewlett Packard. Brian’s teaching and research interests centre on strategic leadership, competitive analysis and strategy innovation, and he has published over 80 articles, chapters and book reviews on these topics, nationally and internationally. 

To learn more about the Executive MBA click here

To attend our upcoming taster evening click here

We met with Emerson Burke Murphy, a former Vet from UCD (2009) who graduated from the Professional Diploma in Accounting (PDA) (2010 First Class) to discuss the change from veterinary to accountancy and his exciting career path which followed.

Why did you choose to change career to accountancy after veterinary medicine?

Veterinary medicine has a very high employment rate due to the small number of graduates each year so this was never a concern of mine. I was always going to specialise in veterinary (equine surgery or equine reproduction) but I came to realise that the opportunities in veterinary at this level were very limiting. I am someone who enjoys understanding the bigger picture of what they are involved in and being removed from this would have frustrated me in time as a vet. Chartered Accountancy appealed to me as a profession involved in some of the most diverse aspects of business.

How did you hear about the Professional Diploma in Accounting (PDA) in DCU?

I graduated from veterinary (UCD) and commenced the PDA in September, graduating in 2010. I secured a training position with KPMG during the 2008 Milkrounds. As part of my interview preparation I was aware of the wall I might face when seen to be making such a dramatic change in direction. To this end, I carried out my own research and through this, became aware of the PDA and its merits. My firm were also very encouraging about the PDA as they had seen good results with it previously. I had the option to begin my training contract in 2009 but stuck with my decision regarding the PDA.

How did the PDA help you with your accountancy exams?

I wanted to complete the PDA as I felt it would ensure I was making the right move and would also give me a head start in KPMG rather than worrying about the most basic accounting concepts during my first audit busy season. The PDA was an incredible help with the CAP2’s as I felt that the PDA syllabus (particularly financial reporting) covered far more than the CAP1 syllabus. One particularly helpful aspect of the PDA structure was all-day tutorials on a Friday. Accounting is best learned through experience and the range of issues tackled during these sessions was very helpful.

How did the interdisciplinary mix in the class help your mind develop?

I still have some very good friends from the PDA who are continually developing professionally. The mix of disciplines was refreshing, particularly coming from such an intense and focused discipline like veterinary. Some of the most memorable participants in my class were the science graduates and the law graduates. This mix is something that the firms look for when recruiting.

Why did you choose Corporate Finance? Do you feel that being a non-relevant graduate gave you added insights in this field and why?

Audit was fundamental in my training and is a great way to understand the detailed financial (and to an extent operational) workings of clients. However, I always wanted to move in the corporate finance direction as the variety of work and the satisfaction from being much more involved with clients and their commercial needs (rather than the regulatory requirement of audit) relates back to my initial reason for choosing Chartered Accountancy.

When I first came to London I expected people to be mystified or resistant to my differing academic background. The reality has been that people see it as an asset as the range of issues dealt with is so diverse and challenges to the normal ways of thinking are always welcome.

After completing the Professional Diploma in Accounting in DCU, Emerson qualified as an accountant (ACA) in 2013 and worked in KPMG for 3 years but is now in Deloitte UK as an Assistant Manager in Corporate Finance and is studying for a Diploma in Corporate Finance via the Chartered Institute of Securities and Investments.

Find out more information and apply for the Professional Diploma in Accounting in DCU here!

DCU Business School will be hosting an Information Evening about the new part-time executive Masters in Aviation Leadership on the 25th June 2015 at 6.00pm. If you are interested in learning more about the programme, you can register here.

About the Programme:

The MSc in Management (Aviation Leadership) is the first programme of its kind in Ireland. Commencing in September 2015, it will be a two year part-time executive masters with elements of the programme delivered both in Dublin Airport, in its capacity as a live laboratory, and in Castlemoate House, daa International’s academy facility, adjacent to Dublin Airport.

Subject Areas:

  • Aviation Leadership
  • Aviation Governance
  • Aerodrome Operations Management
  • Leadership and Change
  • Delivering Performance Excellence [Operational, People and Financial Performance]
  • Strategy, Organization and Innovation
  • Research Methods
  • Aviation Industry based research project

Aims and Objectives:

  • Demonstrate an understanding of the management complexity required to operate the various compnents of Airport Operations
  • Identify the important leadership and management competencies required to plan and execute future aviation industry strategies
  • Demonstrate an understanding of the characteristics, requirements and legal responsibilties of aviation organisations
  • Identify the concepts and skills necessary for conducting business analysis and strategic thinking
  • Develop the ability to lead and initiate professional and/or research activity independently or as part of an aviation management team;
  • Enhance your opportunities to take a leading role in the future development of the aviation industry

Details of the Open Evening:

When: 25th June at 6.00pm

Where: 3rd Floor of DCU Business School, DCU, Collins Avenue, Dublin 9 [Map here]

Register online here

Why attend?

  • Learn first hand about the programme and how it will help to advance your career
  • Speak to members of faculty directly, who can answer any questions you may have
  • Network with members of the aviation industry

Informal Enquiries:

Informal enquiries about the programme can be made via email to pj.byrne@dcu.ie

Register:

You can register to attend online here.

[pullquote]“The secret of getting ahead is getting started”. (Mark Twain)[/pullquote]

Wow! It’s hard to believe that we’ve managed to find our way through semester one of year one of our Executive MBA in DCU Business School.

Three months ago the thoughts of returning to college on a part-time basis was a quite daunting prospect, not only from a work-life balance perspective, which was among the predominant concerns of my fellow MBA classmates, but from an academic point of view, where the very thoughts of “Harvard referencing” sent a shiver down my spine.

Despite the significant consideration that went into applying to commence the programme, the reality is that nothing can prepare you for that first term, when work and college commitments collide, forcing you in the early hours of a Monday evening to question the very reasons you took on the challenge.

A colleague on the course tells a story about how, when he was considering applying, everyone he spoke to including past graduates, spoke in glowing terms about the Executive MBA and recommended without hesitation that he sign-up to the class.

Once enrolled however, the tune changed, where those very same advocates of the course told him that he was beginning a process that may well prove to be the toughest two years of his life!

On both fronts, arguably his advisors got it right. For sure the last 12 weeks of lectures and assignments have tested the staying power, and the Christmas break was like the proverbial calm before the storm, as the January exam schedule loomed large on the horizon and DCU library became almost like a second home for close on three weeks.

But the flip side of these stresses and strains, and quiet clearly why any past graduate would recommend an Executive MBA, has its foundations in the relevance of the modules that we completed during our first semester.

Week on week the professionalism and depth of expert lecturing meant that the theory presented every Thursday evening was almost immediately transferable to the work place first thing Friday morning.

Working in financial services the Accounting for Decision-Making module offered the most relevance from a practical point of view, and provided me with a significant amount of detail on hot topics in business lending and financial ratios. This led to an early morning training session with one of the business teams in North Dublin.

In conjunction with this a number of the assignments were based on delving into past events or assessing current work practices and forced us, both individually and within groups, to apply our learning in the most practical sense. The Organisational Behaviour module opened my eyes to the fact that great leaders aren’t born, but are effectively a continual work in progress who strive to get the best from their people, a simple concept perhaps, but clearly one that is extremely difficult to nail down.

The satisfaction from these submissions (though the process was daunting) lies in the fact that by stretching ourselves to understand a particular event or practice we are in fact responding to what is essentially the underlying current of the Executive MBA; personal development.

So with one semester down and three to go we can approach our second semester in DCU Business School with a little less fear and perhaps a mild sense of calm!

This post was written by Coman Goggins, a first year Executive MBA participant. To download the MBA brochure, fill in your details below:

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In collaboration with Great Place to Work® Ireland, a team of researchers based at Dublin City University (Link Research Institute) and Maynooth University recently conducted a major research project of the current and future challenges faced by HR Managers in Ireland. The aim of this project is to capture HR professionals’ views in order to understand the key challenges faced by HR Managers currently and in the future.

A feedback workshop held at Dublin City University on the 21st of Jan 2015 attracted about 30 HR Directors/Managers drawn from diverse sectors and organizations. The workshop was welcomed by the Dean of DCU Business School Dr. Anne Sinnott and chaired by the CEO of the Great Place to Work® Ireland Mr. John Ryan. The research team presented the survey findings and received valuable feedback from the audience. The findings cover many important HR topics including organizational effectiveness, HR networks, evidence-based management, line managers’ role in HRM, middle managers’ role in change management, work engagement, HR current and future priorities and HR challenges. Participants actively discussed their experience on these topics. The results will be published in a special supplement of the Irish Times.

Picture (right to left): Mr. John Ryan (GPTW), Dr. Claire Gubbins (DCU), Dr. Na Fu (MU), Professor Patrick Flood (DCU), Dr. Edel Conway, Director- Link; Dr. Yseult Freeney (DCU) and Mr. Jim Flynn (GPTW)

DCU Business School has performed strongly in the latest global business masters rankings.

It features in the Top 100 in the world for three of its Masters programmes – E-Commerce, Strategic Procurement and Finance.

The School’s MSc in eCommerce was ranked 14th in the world, and first in Ireland, by the Eduniversal Best Masters Ranking which evaluates the best business Masters and MBA programmes internationally.

Amonth the top-100 ranked programmes at DCU were: MSc E-Commerce – ranked 14th globally and the MSc Finance – ranked 68th globally.

The Eduniversal Best Masters Ranking classifies Masters and MBA programmes which develop and graduate the best new professionals in the global labour market by evaluating employer attitudes, employment prospects on graduation and student satisfaction. It measures the academic excellence and quality of 4,000 programmes in 30 fields of study across 1 000 academic institutions in 154 countries, with final rankings determined through a survey of 5,000 international recruiters and 800 000 students.

Dr Anne Sinnott, Executive Dean of DCU Business School said: “These rankings are a very welcome endorsement, by employers and graduates, of both the academic excellence of the Business School’s postgraduate programmes and the quality of student experience delivered. Our international ranking is improving year on year and I am particularly pleased to note the continuing improvement in the rankings of the MSc in Electronic Commerce and the MSc in Emergency Management, both of which are placed first in Ireland.”

DCU is hosting a CAO Information Evening for school leavers, mature students and parents on Wednesday 14th January between 6-8pm. The Information Evening will take place in the School of Nursing and Human Sciences in DCU and it will give you the opportunity to:

  • Speak to admission staff about the CAO application process.
  • Meet students and staff from DCU Business School and other faculties
  • Learn about student supports at DCU; eg: HEAR, DARE and Sports Scholarships.
  • Find out more about student life, finance and personal development.
  • Attend a talk for mature students on supports available and 3rd level finance.

 

Experienced DCU academic and support staff will also be on hand throughout the evening to answer questions about courses and studying in DCU.

The evening will progress as follows:

6.00 – 7.30pm: Tea/Coffee and refreshments will be served, and parents/students can speak with DCU students and academic staff about our courses (Foyer of Nursing building).

7.00 – 7.30pm: Talk for mature students on supports available and 3rd level finance available.

7.30 – 8.00pm: Talk for all students on student life, finance and personal development.

7.30 – 8.00pm: Talk for mature students on the CAO application process.

Register to attend here

And if you can’t make it, you can access the Online Q&A Session here!