This is a past event
Senior business leaders, alumni and guests of the University are invited to join a discussion with Professor Martin Meyer, Dean and Head of School, and Professor Pervaiz Akhtar, Professor in Business Analytics, Big Data & Supply Chain.
Big data-driven and IT-based skills are becoming vital for modern business operations. Business schools consequently need to integrate such analytical skills in their general management curriculum. However, the optimal integration and relative utilization is limited due to certain challenges like the shortage of multi-skilled academics who possess business domain knowledge as well as equipped with technical skills from computing, statistics and mathematics. Additionally, students in business schools are not fully prepared to take multi-disciplinary-designed curricula that challenge them, creating student dissatisfaction and affecting quality and university rankings ultimately. These challenges link back to courses that students study in their secondary schools and colleges, which need to be updated so they can absorb contemporary developments. Thus, when students come to universities (or business schools), they can cope with contemporary analytical, big data-driven and IT-based courses that are required by different industries. Curricula should thus be co-designed by developing a cross-sectoral collaboration between business schools and specific industries such as healthcare, retail, banking and among others, resulting in higher employability for business schools’ students, value creation and de-risking business operations. This talk presents academic implications of above-referenced challenges.
Professor Pervaiz Akhtar is currently Director of the MBA suite of programmes and Chair (Full Professor) in Business Analytics, Big Data and Supply Chains. He was Associate Dean of Graduate Studies before joining the University of Aberdeen. He is also associated with Imperial College London, as his philosophy of continuous learning, and utilizes mixed methods and modelling to optimize and de-risk operational performance, supply chains and business value. Professor Akhtar is one of only 155 academics across all disciplines in the UK who earned their Professorship under the age of 35 as per HESA records and became the youngest professor from his country of origin (out of over 212 million population)! Capitalizing on over 20 years of academic and industrial experiences from leading public, private, and non-profit-making organizations, he has published in top-ranked journals such as International Journal of Operations & Production Management, British Journal of Management, Business Ethics, among others.
- Speaker
- Professor Martin Meyer and Professor Pervaiz Akhtar