By Hanna McLeod
In many regards, faculty represent the engine behind the major activities that occur within the business school. They lead research efforts that shape the knowledge created around business, create curricula and learning experiences that prepare tomorrow’s managers and leaders, and engage with various internal and external stakeholders to help the business school follow through on its mission and create impact within its community. Faculty are continually evolving in all that they do and represent within their institutions, and as a result their changing roles, expectations, and perceptions can be challenging to keep up with.
On October 19, AACSB with support from EFMD will launch a survey focusing exclusively on faculty—a first of its kind by AACSB. The study will target business school faculty around the world and shed meaningful light on similarities and differences across different groupings of faculty with regard to their perceptions of expectations, and the degree to which they align with one another, their schools, and overall trends within business schools. The study will explore how these perceptions evolve across the trajectory of a faculty member’s career and what priorities may lie ahead of them in the future. Schools that meet a certain participation threshold will have access to aggregated findings representing their institution, in addition to the capability of being able to compare with aggregated findings from a global set of business schools.
As a faculty member, you are encouraged to participate in order to contribute to and subsequently better understand the environment you work in and, perhaps more importantly, the environment that you may find yourself working in the future. The survey invitation will be sent through the dean or head of the business school, who will also be invited to take an abbreviated version of the survey and distribute across his or her faculty. As a dean, encouraging your faculty to participate will not only grant them an opportunity to have their voices and experiences contribute to the body of knowledge around the faculty career, but it will also provide you with insight on how to create an environment that best aligns with the needs and expectations of your faculty.
As you await to receive the survey invitation in your inbox on October 19, I encourage you to read about some recent insights and data on business faculty:
- View the BizEd September/October 2016 Issue with a focus on faculty
- Explore the 2016 Business School Data Guide and its section on faculty (page 20)
- Watch for the release of 2015–16 Business School Questionnaire custom reporting tools, and create custom comparison groups to benchmark faculty-related data against other schools using DataDirect
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